Feedback The forum icons are really really terrible

Hi. Does Unity have a branding department and have they ever visited the forum - the public face of much of your interactions with your users? Please pay a junior designer for 1 day to redesign the fugly forum icons! Or get rid of them all and make them generic like the ones for the sub-forums that never bothered getting one in the first place.

Please also switch this forum over to something like discourse.org! This one is a PAIN to stay if I want to stay up to date with the many important official announcements that appear in various threads.

 

How’s that saying about form and function?

 

Haha. True. In this case both suck big time @AcidArrow. So one is definitely following the other.

 

I disagree. The current icons look dated, but that’s about it. Changing them in order modernize is a waste of time IMO.

Also, what are you missing functionality wise? Zenphoro is pretty reliable and fast and straightforward. I don’t have a lot of experience with discourse, but it seems messier to me and I’m not sure what it offers.

 

bigger announcement seem to get that forum top 'ticker notification' bar (which you can dismiss), that's good enough for me..

although i wouldn't mind if all, even small announcements, test releases etc would be listed in one place,
like cleanup this place for announcements only https://forum.unity.com/forums/announcements.9/

 

How long would it take an admin of this forum to make all the icons generic?

Replying to that would be a waste of my time. There are many many functions I would like that are missing from this forum. I'm saying this both as a regular and someone whose job it is to do UX design. But I'll tell you what... post a screenshot of this thread in your next comment to me and then tell me you loved the experience. Tell me that uploading that screenshot to a third-party provider to be able to show it here was not a waste of your time and then I'll reply in more detail.

I haven't tried zenphoro but I'd say anything should be better than this. As for Discourse, i loved using the Open Frameworks forum before I went down the Unity rabbithole: https://forum.openframeworks.cc Notice the icons they use. That's right. Because they are really not needed.

 

You don’t need to do that though.

Here, directly to this forum, from my phone even.

 

Ok. So now I've noticed that "Upload a file" is what I should be using instead of clicking on the icon of the image, which doesn't give me that option. Another UX win.

 

Yeah. If only the icons were prettier, then it would all make sense.

 

So to answer your earlier question about functionality... Here are some screenshots from the Discourse page...

 

Just in time loading means if I press ctrl+f to search something on the loaded page, I won't get any results since not everything is loaded. It's a silly idea and I hate all sites that use this system.

Xenphoro has notifications too, I'm not sure what you're missing. That stuff you circled seems to be there.

Trust system sounds like gamification bullcrap to me.

I don't know. I still don't understand what you're missing exactly apart from prettier icons.

 

i just refreshed this page to see if you had replied, because it's not dynamic. And I also just checked the threads I subscribe to to see if there were any replies that I had not received an alert for (I've noticed they don't appear if you've visited the thread too recently). And then I'm going to check every sub-forum to see if any of the important things my game depends on (things that would not make it to "ticker tape" because I'm working with preview packages) have been fixed.

In any case I take it you are not a designer. That's fine. You don't have to agree. My post was not for you but was instead for any self-respecting designer at Unity or for anyone from Unity marketing with any nous. If you were a designer, you would puke like me every time you see the icon widths and heights. Attached is a screenshot to illustrate. Take into account that the icons are centered so the difference in size should be double for the vertical lines.

 

You're trolling. Searching works brilliantly in Discourse. Try it. Hit Ctrl F on this thread: https://forum.openframeworks.cc/t/sony-ps3-eye/1182
Also click on the search icon in the top right and go through the filter options.
Then try pressing Ctrl F on any page from a long Unity thread and see if you're happier with the results.

 

Judging from you, I'd say designers are arrogant and abrasive, so I'd probably fit right in.

But since this post was not for me and I am therefore wasting my time by reading your posts I will also say this (not for you):

I hope Unity remembers Lithium.

 

Uh huh. It still haunts me to this day.

Updated forum icons have been on our to-do list for a while. As I've mentioned in previous threads, we are looking at a migration of the forums and this would be a part of that.

 

Great to hear @UnityMaru. It's what I would call low-hanging fruit, but the thing with those is that they tend to be easy to pick. Updating the icons is essentially a day's worth of work at most, and 1 minute at best (if you make them all the same or remove them). So get that off your to-do list!

Also, please try a Ctrl-F on the Discourse thread I posted. That's the sort of functionality the UT forum sorely needs. If it's easier to find things, then people are less likely to start multiple threads on the same topic and everyone ends up being happier.

 

I wish it were that easy, believe me. Our team has lots of other low hanging fruits which must take priority. The feedback is most appreciated and being documented, believe me

 

Where you want to migrate the forum to?
Whatever you do, make sure it works on mobile first, because thats where I use the forum a lot when not on the computer.

 

I don't intend to derail this thread - we're looking at options still and it remains in early stages. I would like to reassure users that Lithium taught us several lessons and we want to make the impact as minimal as possible.

 

I’ll just add that one thing I like about these forums is that they’re usable with stuff like noscript. (the notifications don’t get dynamically updated but otherwise they are usable).

Stuff like discourse completely falls apart when using noscript.

But in any case, this fills me with a bit of hope for whatever changes might come:

 

Can’t you add the forum URL to your noscript whitelist @AcidArrow? In any case, I’ll just add that Unity should not be designing for the tiny minority of users who choose to use plugins that disable basic web functionality. In UX you never design for the 100% except when it comes to accessibility.

 

A forum requiring JS for its basic functionality is bad design IMO.