Whew! What a hot mess. Let's try this to have some sort of conversation. In fairness to DSS, they aren't the only online presence to drink the Kool-Aid that all online posts can be categorized as "questions", "ideas", etc. Which I guess wouldn't be TOO annoying as a general label until you take the next step of altering functionality based on the type of post. Anyhow, that's a whole different soap box.
I'll also try to avoid going down the rabbit hole of how this is a terrible solution for an online forum and try to focus on basic UI improvements that will hopefully prevent near constant hair pulling.
MAJOR ISSUES
1. The UI is not interactive enough in appropriate ways.
For example, I have a section in "Communities" called "My Communities". I've been trying to prune these communities I have no interest in. Left clicking on the communities selects them. You can quibble on what should happen at that point. Moving on, Right clicking doesn't get me ANY contextual menu options. In neither case does any of the other sections of the UI alter so that I can MANAGE these communities. To manage them I have to go through a completely unintuitive series of commands in another section of the interface and do that for EACH community in order to unsubscribe from these communities which I didn't subscribe to in the first place. This is just one example of the type of interactivity one would expect of an online environment that has been around for years.
2. Main Content Display
There is a complete lack of any customizable way of altering how content is displayed in the main content area. No multiple columns, no title only, no clear indication of which community the post is from, no notification that new posts have been made (on the thread itself). While the notification pane is ok that shouldn't be the only indicator of thread status.
3. Help Files are Inadequate or Non Existent
-What is the difference in each type of post? What is the functionality?
-How do I manage communities?
-What does each pane in this environment do?
These are just BASIC questions and there is no simple way to find the answers. It would be tremendously incompetent for this content to not exist. So, I assume it is simply locked away behind this unintuitive interface.
This is what I've come up with after 1 hour of using this site. I am nothing special. If I could identify these major areas in need of improvement in a relatively short period of time, how did the beta testing, development process miss this. Then the fact this has been online for years....*sigh*...sorry, I digress.
OK. I've already succumbed....I'll try and consolidate some of these suggestions. As always there is a bit of subjectivity involved in everyone's user experience.
0. Listen to the users who provided similar suggestions months or years ago.
LIST OF SUGGESTED IMPROVEMENTS
1. Basic community management such as subscribing/unsubscribing should happen in the main display where they appear as a list. In my environment that's the left pane.
2. Whichever type of post allows for others aside from the original poster to respond with full text editor support should be the default post type for this community.
2b. If no such type exists, create one!
3. User should be able to toggle how much information from each post is displayed. One mode should be caption/title only.
4. The code that manages how the posts are currently displayed needs optimized for desktop (or again a mode to optimize for desktop access). There is a lot wasted whitespace on these posts. Most CAD professionals I know do not have a separate mobile device just for accessing this forum.
5. Help should be much more robust, targeted and integrated appropriately. Too many holes to get more specific than that.
5b. Direct link to the appropriate help files for using the 3DExperience Platform. (There is a direct link in the comments posted by Tom SIEMASZKO).
6. Users who choose to add the Solidworks User Forum community should automatically be added as authors for that community.
7. For the love of all that is holy, do not automatically subscribe everyone to all 54 communities. Since an unsubscribe all is either unavailable or hard to find, manually unsubscribing to avoid spam is a tedious pain.
8. Stop the marketing spam posts. They were annoying enough as e-mails (which is why many unsubscribed from your e-mail list). Hopefully unsubscribing from all other communities will solve this.
9. Posts with new comments/replies should cycle to the top of the list. If this is technically difficult to do with the main content area, then there needs to be a separate view/pane with this functionality.
10. Make it simple to post links to previous posts.
11. Since the text to the right of 3DSwym looks likes its an incredibly important bit of information (I got stuck using the search bar and couldn't figure out how to get out of it), it should be WAY more clear that this is a functional drop down that controls the functionality and layout of your entire interface.
FINAL UPDATE:
I appreciate the responses from users as well as DSS personnel. After learning more at http://www.cadforum.net I've decided to stop updating this post.
DSS has demonstrated a complete lack of regard for previous user input from selected individuals from the old SW Forum I've decided to put my time elsewhere than this post. If DSS chose to ignore them before, the ball is in their court. They have the connections to users more experienced and more invested (well, at least they WERE more invested) than I, and can reach out to them if they chose to do so. If any DSS/SW executives seem surprised at this, I would investigate why you weren't informed of the major reservations and suggestions that were provided by the user group DSS specifically gathered for that purpose. By their own account, they've provided the feedback from this post and much more already and it was ignored. I am not so prideful to think my efforts and stature in the SW community are greater than those fine folks.
A tip of the hat to everyone. Adieu
