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Sneak Preview #1: Community UI and Platform Changes are Coming!

Jon_Chen
Marketo Employee
Marketo Employee

Hello Marketing Nation,

With 2020 just around the corner, we wanted to give you a peek at some changes that are coming to the Marketing Nation Community. This post is the first of a series of posts that will detail all improvements we have planned, including significant changes to the design, search capabilities, navigation structure, gamification, and more!

As usual, these changes were reviewed in close collaboration with several of you - thanks to everyone who participated. We hope that these improvements make the Community easier to navigate, more organized, and most importantly, more fun!

Without further ado, here’s your first sneak preview of the upcoming Community changes. Please note that these designs are not final and may change prior to release. All improvements will be rolled out mid-December 2019 January 2020:

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Here's some additional context for the design changes above:

A Completely Redesigned Community Interface

  • Quick access to search bar: Search is important – we know that it’s the first thing most of you look for when visiting the Community. In our new Community, the search bar has been magnified to make it even easier to access.
  • Lighter dropdown navigation structure: Keeping it simple! We’ve changed the navigation bar to drop down automatically and hyperlinked key areas in our Community so that you can visit more places with less clicking.
  • Cleaner forums interface: Notice anything different about the main page? We have significantly changed our Community interface for a better browsing experience. All of our pages have been re-designed with an improved forum layout, more visual iconography, and improved font.

Upcoming Adjustments to Community Structure

  • Subscriptions: Though the move to the new Khoros platform comes with a collection of very exciting improvements, unfortunately user subscriptions will not be carried over. This means that bookmarks, subscriptions to threads and places, inbox messages, and friend connections will be erased during the migration.

    If you have any content in your inbox and/or connections that are crucial to you, please take precautionary steps to save your subscriptions and who you’re following to ensure that they are not lost in the migration. Note that only the content in your INBOX will be erased – the content you previously followed and/or posted will still remain and be searchable on Community.
  • Ideas: As many of you are aware, there are various development stages associated with an idea in the Ideas Space of Community (13 to be exact!). Though we intended for these labels to add transparency to the progress of an idea, having too many stages makes submitting an idea more confusing than it needs to be.
    Moving forward, all ideas stages will be consolidated in the following buckets: 
    • Stage 1: Under Review
      • Stage 1a: No Plans to Build
      • Stage 1b: Planned for Build
      • Stage 1c: Already Have It
    • Stage 2: In Process
    • Stage 3: In Production
  • Labels: What were previously known as Category Folders (Marketo-defined tags) will be known as “Labels” moving forward.
  • Events and Polls: Khoros does not support certain Jive interaction styles. As a result, polls will not be migrated over and events will be migrated over as regular discussions/questions.
  • Restructuring Our Community: We took this opportunity to reorganize select areas in our community where we felt were redundant or misplaced. The following areas have been reorganized:
    • The Japan Products Space will be consolidated into the Japan MUG.
    • The Japan Partners subspace will move to the Partners category.
    • All Champion-related content will be located in the Champion Program category (blogs, discussions, and documents).
    • All blogs by Marketo Employees will be placed in “Employee Blogs” moving forward.
    • All “discussion” posts will be consolidated as questions.

Please keep in mind that consolidating or moving spaces or content will only affect the location of content. It will NOT result in deletion of posts or reset group permissions.

That’s it for this week’s Community Sneak Preview! I hope you're as excited as I am for the upcoming changes. As always, please reach out to me at jonchen@adobe.com if you have any questions, or just comment in the section below. You can also check out our next Sneak Preview here, where we’ve covered all improvements coming to Search.

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15 Comments
Diego_Lineros2
Level 7

For a second I thought that you will make the UI experience across the platform consistent, of course it is only for the community....

Jackie_Potts
Level 7 - Champion Alumni

Thanks for the updates!

Malik_Zafar2
Level 4

Thanks Jonathan! 

Amy_Goldfine
Level 10 - Champion Alumni

Exciting stuff! Thanks for the update.

Grace_Brebner3
Level 10

Awesome to see the current status of designs - and good to know re: bookmarks, etc...

Josh_Pickles
Level 7

I like the consolidation of labels under ideas, and like Grace pointed out, it's good to know about the bookmarks etc. 

Heather_Correa
Level 3

Excited about the updates.

Janet_Dulsky
Marketo Employee

Marketing Nation, having managed this magical community for several years now, I am beyond excited that we finally have the opportunity to take Community to the next level based on the feedback we have heard from you consistently over time!

Many, many thanks to Jonathan Chen‌ and Lauren Schutte‌ for all their work to make these changes real. They have spent countless hours since July working with our design and technology teams to execute on your feedback and get ready to unveil the new Community next month. Can't wait! 

Adam_Vavrek1
Level 9 - Champion Alumni

Great changes, esp. the search bar!

Julz_James
Level 10

Can't wait to see the new layout and user experience!