Feedback on NI Community
New forum layout?
Hi everyone.
I have read through the comments on this thread, and I can tell you that I will use them as we evaluate our next updates for ni.com. I have been the project lead for the sitewide changes and wanted to give you a little background on this project.
1. Two of the main goals for this project were to get site-wide consistency and put a framework in place that we could easily update and make changes when necessary. The foundation is now in place, and now we can start to evaluate some of the changes that we still need to make. Also, we were not able to touch every application that runs our website, we hit about 78% of them, but as was noted there are still ones out there that we have to address.
2. We've been working on this project for awhile- requirements started around 2010 - yes I know that's old and then some iterations have been made. We're dealing with old applications, and VERY many so it was difficult to ensure that we encapsulated all the use cases and requirements. We would've/could've/should've reviewed our original requirements in more detail. TOUCHÉ! Point taken.
3. The majority of our visitors (about 85%) visit more than one site section during their visit - we have to think about the entire user experience and ensure that they don't have to relearn each page layout, or functions over and over. It looks however, like we erred on the side of consistency a little too much. I will take at look specifically at the fixed width issue and font sizing to see what we can do about those. I am currently pulling all of our recent data for browsers and resolutions to ensure that we are optimizing the site for the majority. We did do testing with all current browsers that we support, but I do not think we did extensive testing on different resolutions. In the future, we want to move to a more responsive design but I had to have the foundation in place first. Without it, I would have still been creating one off experiences on ni.com.
4. With all the passion here 
, I would love to have any of you who are interested , sign up for our user research panel. This would get you out in front of changes that we are making to ni.com and would get us making changes that are beneficial to what you are trying to accomplish. Ideally, in the future, we won't have to do such big bang changes, and can just make small incremental changes, that don't interfere with what you are trying to accomplish. Here is the link for the user research panel if you are interested.
Hello Maureen,
thanks for sharing your thoughts with us. I suppose everyone here understands and appreciates your efforts for making ni.com more user friendly but you're right: you've been too rigid in your struggle for consistency ; I don't really understand where consistency implies fixed-width pages, but I'm not a web developer so I don't assume I can understand technical details that guided you that way.
But please note that in several points this rigidity has unwanted effects: an additional example is the community page, where the search field and help control overlap, at least in Italian localization) as you can see in this image:
(...it appears a little squeezed due to forum width limits... )
The overlap effect can be due to italian texts longer than expected or to my long username: in both cases a little more room would have helped.
Where you should be more rapid in my opinion is in giving a feedback to user suggestions: take a look for example at this thread. I posted this suggestion on oct, 2012, updated in dec, 2013 and never got any feedback. I understand now that you were refactoring the whole site and my note would be addressed and solved in this process, but a simple "we're taking care of it" would be enough to let me know you noted it.
As per your item #4, I didn't know such a panel exist at all 
. I have joined it now, as I am willing to collaborate in making it better and better.
Not holding my breath, but the simple solution to the layout was spelled out in several posts, so I am not sure what prevents this from being applied.
There is one positive side to the new layout though and it is illustrated by my personal profile (as of now):
Indeed, absurdly long topic titles are wrapped around over several lines and...become much more legible than in a full-screen view, pre-shrinkage time.
I am not sure why the further occurrences of the topic are abbreviated as "Re: Please...", but that too might be considered a good solution (to a problem that I created for the purpose of demonstration ad absurdum).
