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

[Jon_Chen]

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:

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.

[Chris_Wilcox]

Love the simplification of Idea labels, and great to know about bookmarks. 

New UI looks much cleaner, easier to navigate, easier to follow/keep track of topics and discussions which is exactly what community should be about. 

[ChristinaZuniga]

It's a bit disconcerting to see who we follow/who follows us will be lost, especially since that goes into badges and there are some awesome people that I follow. This doesn't have a date against it - when does it go live (so I know how long I have to try to doc who I'm following)?

[Jon_Chen]

Completely understand that this may be frustrating, especially for more veteran users who have accumulated a lot of followers or follow a lot of people. Though this will be lost, moving forward your badges correlated with that will be migrated over as legacy badges. We're also looking into what new badges we can create that will reward for similar community actions.

As for a specific date, that's not something I can reveal at this point, but please try to document everything by the first week of December. Hope that makes sense, and let me know if you have any other questions! 

[Michael_Langell]

Guess I am fairly late to this party, although I assume I am not alone when I say not everyone has time to watch community posts like a hawk. 

There are two things I am very disappointed in. 

1. Marketo's inability to migrate over community users' data.  This is the 2nd migration where I have lost my bookmarks and subscriptions to interesting comments/issues .  What is the point of using the community if every couple of years, these migration projects occur where you lose half of the most important information to you? 
2. Marketo's inability to effectively communicate these changes.  Why can't an email get sent regarding a major change like this?    

Imagine if Facebook migrated to a new platform and told all its users - sorry, but you need to friend request all your old friends because we need to migrate to this new platform.  All the companies you follow you will need to re-follow.  Anything you saved will get lost.  Even better, they post this message on their corporate facebook user group wall and do not email any of their billions of users.  It would be the end of their platform!   

Anyways I've learned my lesson - google chrome bookmarks are more reliable way to use this community.  

[Jon_Chen]

Hey @Michael_Langell. Thanks for reaching out. I understand that losing all your bookmarks and subscriptions was really frustrating. The Community is constantly evolving, and we strive to always be proactive and transparent with our customers about these changes. Additionally, we appreciate any customer feedback and take it into consideration for any future updates. Though we don't plan on moving platforms anytime in the future, we'll be sure to communicate bookmarks/subscription data loss at a wider scale if relevant. Please let me know if you have any questions.