It does look more modern and slick. It matches the unrealengine.com site style more. Some new features are cool.
But readability suffers heavily with the current design. It takes more mental load to navigate and read.
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Definitely need a light theme.
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Something to bring you with one click to the latest/last post of a topic (maybe this already exists?) In general optimizing for least amount of mouse clicks.
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Writing lists is not a nice workflow currently, i need to click the list button for each point instead of just having a new bullet point added automatically if i press enter
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It gives the vibe of being a mobile website that hasn’t been properly adjusted for desktop in terms of space use, spacing, font sizes, colors and so on
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The forum categories and also the topics are not sufficiently visually distinctive from one another. That makes it slower to tell them apart. Maybe try using brightness/color of the background a bit to separate categories and also topics.
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Icons were helpful in the old forums for quick readability ie for categories. Imagine an Unreal Engine UI without icons and only text. Same for here, it slows things down.
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Need to group all the subforum categories more somehow, at the moment it’s a few huge blocks. Colors and spacing would be helpful.
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Currently the Latest box on the right takes a lot of space, which is a bit overwhelming and makes it even harder to distinguish the subforum categories, which already suffered readability from before. Maybe shift it to a tab or to the bottom.
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One of the advantages of having a forum vs discord is things like signatures, roles, post count and all these other stats that people appreciate and care about. Try to embrace that and give it back to people. It’s one of the strength’s a forum has - play to them.
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Stickied threads suffered readability. As a user, I want to be able to quickly scan all the “Rendering” subcategory threads, but that’s really hard right now because it almost just looks
like one big box of text, even though it is 5 or so separate threads. Thread title and subtext/preview text look extremely similar. A color distinction or a stronger size distinction would help. Also visually they merge together a bit too much, I would try to give them more separation, with border linings or via coloring the backgrounds differently. -
Try and use colors with symbols and icons too (ie the locks or pins next to threads)
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In General: More Icons, more color-use, more separation, more borders, use of background color for distinction , more spacing for separation etc
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It’s easy to go a bit too overboard with minimalism and slickness and I think that’s what partly has happened here. It doesn’t just have to look cool as a screenshot, it should be navigable as quickly as possible and use up the least amount of mental load to find what you are looking for
Those are just my first impressions quickly written as I see stuff. I could imagine this encapsulates part of what some people brought up in the thread.