Featured Articles Slider and Search Everywhere

There are many exciting UI elements we are adding to Version 4 to make browsing more enjoyable and convenient. Today I am going to talk about a couple of core UI elements that are new to the software:

1. New Home page w/ Article Slider and Featured articles
2. Top Navigation bar w/ Search Everywhere

New Home Page with Article Slider and Featured Articles

The most prominent change you will notice immediately in the screen shots is the new forum home page with a big Article Slider at the top and up to 10 featured articles listed beneath it.
Typically when you land on a traditional forum platform you see a gigantic forum list, and it can be very intimidating to new users because they have no idea where interesting contents are located and will have to first browse the forum list, and then browse the message list.
 
People tend not to stick around if they can't spot hot topics or understand what's going on right away.
 
In V4, we solve this problem by giving you the ability to feature popular contents you want people to see right away. And this feature is not limited to the contents on your forum; it can be anything like a short intro to your Facebook page too. When you featured an article, you can add a short description, upload an eye catching photo to make it outstanding, and if this article is to be featured on the top Article Slider (useful when you want to show a big photo), you can even add captions to the photo and style the captions and photos individually (you can rotate the photo, change the opacity, etc.). See the screen shots for example.

With this new layout, you can effectively guide new users and re-familiarize infrequent users, making it easy to engage your members.

Of course, it doesn't mean we have removed the forum list at all. If you prefer, you can still make it the default home page. But I believe you will find it more engaging with the new presentation style.
 

New Top Navigation bar w/ Search Everywhere

Another common issue with forums is that it takes 2 or more clicks ( = page loads) for users to see the important message lists (e.g. subscribed, unread, active, etc.), and once you have read a message, it takes multiple clicks again to locate another message on a different list. Although this is not a major barrier to the using of the forum, it is not very convenient either.
 
Again, in V4 we make everything easier to use. When you click on the top navigation bar, a drop down will show (see screen shots), giving you access to all the lists immediately, and it doesn't take any page refresh at all to switch between lists.

And if you haven't noticed it already, there is a search box on the drop down, too. What this means is that you no longer have to go to the dedicated search page to perform a simple search! Type in a search phrase and you will see the results immediately, WITHOUT a single page refresh.
 
The best thing about this is that since the top navigation bar powers this feature, everything we talked about above is available on all pages of the forum! You don't need any page loads to access the lists anymore.
 

Release is scheduled for Q2, 2012

We will be releasing more exciting info about V4 like what we have done for the past months, and because of the complexity involved in bringing tighter integration with Facebook, we need a bit more time to polish and test. Therefore, we aim to release the beta in Q2 2012 and soon after that the final version.
 
Thanks again for your time and this will be the last post from me for 2011. Merry Christmas and Happy holidays!

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I really don't like that new homepage and not sure how it would work on a forum like mine, are we going to have the option of a traditional forum homepage like it looks in V3?

Looks really interesting.   Can't wait to see the beta in action.

Thanks for your replies.

And yes, as I said in the post, you can still have the old school style if you prefer . Maybe I should upload a screenshot of that in case some of you thought it is mandatory.

Samuel

Thanks for your replies.

And yes, as I said in the post, you can still have the old school style if you prefer . Maybe I should upload a screenshot of that in case some of you thought it is mandatory.

Re-read the post and saw that note this time. It would be nice to see the new "old" home page.