Making Community Navigation Less Complex

[alan@ebay]

Hi eBay Community users, 

Whenever I meet eBay members, I ask them if they use The eBay Community.  Most say they are aware of it; some use it, some have stopped. If they say they don't use the Community, I ask them why. Users tell us that the number one barrier is the number of boards. They find the number of different places they can post overwhelming, and as a result, they are confused/daunted and don't know where to post. 

We've been thinking about this for months. Yesterday we took the first steps down the path to reducing the difficulty of Community navigation by 1) reducing the number of general Q&A boards down to two (Selling and Buying) and 2) mandating labels on posts on those boards. 

To ensure that users can still navigate to topic-based Q&A posts that interest them, we have mandated labels. We've been trialing labels out on the Selling Q&A board, and we're happy to report that we've seen good adoption of labels. On the right side of that board (on desktop. bottom of the page on mobile), you'll see the labels that users have applied to their posts. So, for example, if you want to see posts related to Payments, you click the 'Payments' label, and you're able to see all posts on that board with that label. 

We've archived the following Q&A boards - 

Buying & Selling Basics 

Getting Started

Starting an eBay Business

Shipping & Returns

Payments

My Account

Tools & Apps

We'll monitor the impact of this change on the Q&A boards. If we feel that it has improved the user experience, we may implement similar changes on the discussion boards.

We welcome your feedback & questions on this change. 

[coffeebean832]

I don't mind the idea however should you move this to the general discussion boards I do have suggestions to improve the user experience-

• Move the labels box above the most helpful authors box
  • Reason- It would probably be utilized more and be more helpful than viewing the most popular posters of the month
• Enable the ability to filter more than one label at a time
  • Reason:-If you merge several boards there may be topics (labels) people don't want to read about, and there will likely be more than one topic that people do want to read about. Filtering by multiple labels will allow users to customize their experience and see everything at once. If we don't have the ability to view multiple labels at once then it may be even more cumbersome to switch labels than it is to switch boards right now.
    • If you want to take it a step further- and this is probably something Khoros doesn't have built yet so it would be a custom project- you could enable users to create these label filters and save them to their profiles as a default view so they don't have to re-do the filters each time they log in.
• If this is expanded to the general buying and selling boards then there would need to be a "general selling" and "general buying" label since a lot of topics don't fit into the narrowed down labels. In fact, I would suggest removing some of the labels on your list and adding others if this moves to the general discussion boards.

[tereshand_86]

 wish  there was a easier way , I come in and  yes very confusing where to post,     like  discussion area easier to use,   and so many you can not make a new  post in,  or  I  dont know how not sure   I  have  reported so many price gouging,,   come on you guys  all  you need to do is  type in  products we are in need of lysol,  clorox,  toliet paper, sanitizer and   you will see  the price gouging,    and   a  x   to remove products off the list when u  report ,    and when  look at some of these items in  some of ebay sellers list,,   are just the products we need and price gouging   some are selling the products 100x the  price u purchase   in stores,    I hope you  not only remove the product but the seller who   continue to do so, if this is wrong place to comment,   sorry,  still confusing how to  comment on correct  topics

[alan@ebay]

This is great feedback. Thanks for sharing your enhancement requests, @coffeebean832. I will share them with Khoros. 

[coffeebean832]

alan@ebay- One more thing and probably the most important to many here:

With the addition of labels the boards should remain a "discussion board" format and not be changed to a "group" format.

- The group format has comments instead of replies which makes it very difficult to follow the conversation

- The group format is less space-efficient on the screen

I hope that makes sense. My first reply here was with an assumption that the discussion board format would remain but I realized I shouldn't make that assumption. Thanks for considering this feedback!

[bar-29368]

It wouldn't hurt to go back to using some of that "valuable front page real estate" to actually advertise the Community's existence, Way back when, the Community actually had a link on the top header bar on the front page.

Pointless making the boards etc "easier to navigate" (though imho the so called labels are just another form of tagging) when people don't even know they exist in the first place.

[diehardhiker]

Using this board more often recently and finding its number one attribute to be: Cumbersome!

That's not to say it doesn't work ok for smaller, few-answer threads; quick hitters with not much content. It is completely unwieldy for larger/longer threads.

The Khoros software is very dissimilar to most other forum software. What is the attraction? Tweaking to achieve a regular forum interface may be possible, but...

Anyways, glad to find you're looking to improve the experience. When people care, it's appreciated.