1. Fora Mobile App

The Fora App is the next evolution in online communities and forums. The name Fora, which is plural for Forums, does precisely that – aggregates all of the companies' communities into one place across iOS and Android.

Users can discover, explore and follow any communities or discussions they may not have known about. This cross-community pollination aims to fuel the shared expertise and discover knowledge on subjects they love.

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The Challenge.

Despite a historically successful M&A and monetization strategy, the company has struggled with organic growth in overall user base, engagement and revenue.

Today's heavily fragmented tech stack makes it nearly impossible to manage the product at scale from product development, community management, sales and operations perspectives.

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The Objective.

Design a validated, modern online forum experience to drive user engagement & growth through content creation and discovery across existing and new forums.

Develop a product that aligns with our North Star: “Enabling the world to share expertise and discover knowledge on subjects they love.”

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My Role.

As part of the product team, I contributed as a Product Designer towards:
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- Partnering with Product and Engineering to conceptualize and execute product
- Discover core needs through a series of research activities.
- Validate opportunities through accelerated concept generation and prototype testing.
- Create high-fidelity UI and prototypes.
- Assist in a product strategy and roadmap generation focused on delivering core platforms/services and a modern experience.

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My Design Process.

My process follows the double diamond method, championing divergent and convergent thinking.


The Four Phases of the Double Diamond Design Process:

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Problem Discovery and Divergence
1. Discover: a deep dive into the problem we are trying to solve.
2. Define: synthesizing the information from the discovery phase into a problem definition.

Problem Solution and Convergence
3. Develop: think up solutions to the problem.
4. Deliver: pick the best solution and build that.

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Design Process in Practice:

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Building and Testing Concepts:

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User Research

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User Insights

There are three unique and inter-related jobs that forums help users fulfill. It takes all three to provide unique value that other products cannot deliver.

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The personas that follow show how users behave differently on forums for a specific topic.

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Opportunity

1. Facilitate reciprocity in knowledge building

2. Empower users to self-organize

3. Set learners on a fast track to Mastering

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Prioritizing Hypothesis

As a group, we discuss each Hypothesis in the matrix and decide on the importance and uncertainty of each. We then filtered the Hypothesis for anything “Very Important” and above, as well as “Must Test.” We then secretly voted for our top 3, and everyone had an opportunity to explain their rationale.

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The hypothesis we decided to move forward with is:

We believe that cross-community movement will be achieved if members are free to experiment with other communities without fear of altering their reputation by being able to manage identities across different communities

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Idea Generation

Crazy 8s

Crazy 8s is a fast sketching exercise that challenges people to sketch 8 distinct ideas in 5 minutes. Some team members without a design background may find this method intimidating initially but I find this is a great exercise to get the team thinking broadly about the problem we're trying to solve

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Concept Maturation

Storyboarding

The Next phase in our concept exploration is to storyboard our potential solutions. Stories are one of the cost-efficient ways to capture, convey, and explore different user experiences during the design process.

I explored the concepts of shared threads on trending topics across communities where guests can post will result in greater engagement.

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Low Fid wireframe and prototype

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Validation

I conducted a round of 1:1 usability sessions with 6 Participants

Conduct interviews over video with members and guests of the forum space

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Task Objective

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Shared threads from different communities on trending topics

The main objective is understanding whether shared threads on trending topics across communities where guests can post will drive greater engagement.

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Understand if users are open to seeing content from other communities

We aim to better understand the user's perception of cross-community content to gauge if this is desirable to them.

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Interesting Learnings

The concept of a shared thread is unclear to participants 4/6

Community nomenclature is ambiguous. An example of this is when participants observed a member posting from “Audiworld”, they couldn’t make sense of it. It was not obvious to participants there are members from multiple forums in discussion.

Implications:
- Find ways to emphasize and reinforce mental model of a “forum aggregating other forums”
- Need to be very careful about terminology

“…So, I guess this forum has 12 communities within it?”

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Second Iteration

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Problem Validation

In light of our recent observations, it’s clear that a home feed populated by multiple communities was confusing to first-time users and long-term members of the forums. As a team, we tackled this problem with an additional design sprint.
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Hypothesis #1:

To help them understand the purpose of the home feed, we believe that letting our users select from a list of relevant communities based on their interests will give context. Users will see how the chosen communities appear on their home feed, alleviating confusion and giving them a head start on the Fora app.
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Hypothesis #2:

Competitive research showed that two-tier categories (interest) are the most commonly used for sectioning users while onboarding.

Letting the user select up to three tiers of 'interests' will give them enough granularity to decide which community is right for them.

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Task Objective

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Comprehend multiple communities

After completing the onboarding process, I set out to understand if participants can comprehend seeing multiple communities on the home feed.
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Understand the selection process and Users mental model

We aim to better understand the users' interest selection process and mental model - specifically the level of detail needed to find an interest that matches their preferences.

Signals that we are looking for:

1. User attempts to expand further into interest categories. What do you expect to find when you tap on a subcategory?

2. User selects one or more interest categories. If more, then how diverse are the interests?
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Learn about expectations

We aim to get a better understanding of what a user expects to happen when they select multiple communities.

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Research Goal

Score an 80% or more task completion rate for interest based onboarding.

Score above 4 on an ‘Ease of use’ Likert scale

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High Fidelity Solutioning

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Validation

I conducted a round of 1:1 usability sessions with 6 Participants

Conduct interviews over video with a new set of members and guests of the forum space

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