🤝 Team

Team of Engineers, Head of Product, Product Designer, Community Success Team

🤔 What's Community Creator Onboarding?

Forem is open-source software for building modern and independent communities for developers, peers, customers, and users. Forem is already powering communities that serve over 10 million monthly unique visitors.

There are few personas in it. First and most important is the Creator of the community, someone who will create the community alongside admins and moderators.

Community Creator Onboarding is a process where we allow creators to set up their Forem quickly so they feel proud of how it looks and works before they publish it to their first few members.

📃 Problem Statement

Once creators run their community, they land on the blank home page. The current home page experience is not intuitive and self-explanatory, making it difficult for creators to understand their next step of action.

1. ⚠️ Two sets of actions on the home feed: As we can see in the mock above, there are two actionable items for creators. The banner is sending them to the admin/customization/config page without giving any context on what to do next. In addition, the checklist approach is not dynamic and stays the same even if you complete a particular action. It is also not a mandatory step since the creator can dismiss it by clicking “x” anytime.
2. ⚠️ No clear instructions: There is no instruction/motive behind finishing a particular task. If we are making the user act on something, then we should have a strong reason for it or show them its value.
3. ⚠️ No utilization of empty-space: There are lots of empty spaces and are not being utilized well. Also, those feed filters do not serve any purpose here without any posts.
4. ⚠️ Some technical requirements are not mentioned: A few more actions must be done before publishing the Forem, which are not mentioned here.
5. ⚠️ Static checklist: The current checklist is static. It stays the same even when the creators finish any task, thus making their progress confusing. In addition, the checklist remains in the same state on the page even after completing all the tasks.
6. ⚠️ Multiple links to the Admin Guide: There are multiple links for the Admin Guide, which creates confusion. At this point, we can provide only the Quickstart guide as a part of the checklist because it is the most relevant.

There is an admin instruction book that gives creators a brief explanation about the setup process. However, we should make the platform well-versed with instructions for an easy and delightful setup experience.

Also, this is the creators' first interaction with Forem, so it shouldn’t be so complicated.

Since this is not something worked upon extensively before, we must build this experience from scratch.

⛳️ Our Plan

Walk creators through the setup process and explain why those steps are necessary before publishing a Forem. That will help creators complete all requirements without any ambiguity.

The solutions product and design teams make are not always what users want. Something we learned by User testing. So we decided to go for Remote User Testing with the help of a tool called Useberry. It lets you test the Figma prototype with a set of users.