Which category page design do you prefer? (Desktop)

CC_Jon
Wed, 09 Dec 2020 21:06:04 +0000

This post is about the desktop view only. The mobile view isn’t affected by this potential change and has separate considerations.

Looking at the Categories page, which is the default view for new users, I’m not sure we’re putting our best foot forward. I’m excited that people can finally find all of our categories without having to discover the Forum Index. But the right-hand side shows the latest threads, which are disorganized. So I’d like to consider a few alternatives. There’s a poll at the bottom of this post if you want to give feedback.

Categories and subcategories only

A very simple view that shows how many threads each category gets. If you want to see the latest threads, there is another tab for that.

Categories with featured threads

This version includes any pinned posts and threads with recent replies. It helps people know what sort of topics you might find in each category by giving examples.

Categories and subcategories in boxes

Similar to the list of categories and subcategories, but puts each top-level category in a box to save space.

Categories with latest posts on the right

This is what we have now. The main advantage is it occasionally surfaces threads from categories that don’t get much notice otherwise. But it will be mostly dominated by a few very active threads.

Poll

Click to view the poll.

Please also let me know in a reply why you like (or dislike) particular options. Most likely this won’t be the final design for the page. We’d like to explore other ways of showing categories that are relevant to users. For instance, if a student is applying to a school, they should see that school near the top of the list. So this poll is mostly to help me figure out what makes sense for the immediate future while our developers are working on more pressing issues.