I have been thinking a lot about Radar’s content and the wealth of information Radar has. And how the bulk of it becomes hidden as more conversations happen.
How might we make Radar’s content more accessible regardless of new conversations? How might we rearrange Radar’s content in a more timeless and usable context?
After a little research, I came up with a few changes which could be helpful. I would love to hear our thoughts on them.
For the research:
- I looked at the kind of posts we have made on Radar. Which type of posts had the most engagement, why, what made them special?
- I asked a few members how they used Radar.
- I looked at other Discourse-based communities and other forums. How did they make their communities contributions timeless?
This lasted for a little over a month. My insights from this are:
- There were 2 major types of posts people made; opinions and tips/guides. There were also some support/aid type posts and some questions/I-have-a-challenge posts.
- People use Radar as a source for research and know-how, like a wiki. Some bookmarked specific posts for reference purposes.
- Looking at other communities, Product Hunt and Feverbee’s communities were very helpful. I like how Product Hunt catalogued their live chats. On Feverbee, I like how they redesigned their Discourse-based community homepage.
So why not rearrange Radar’s information using these insights? This would make content more useful and discovery, easier. To do this my thoughts revolved around:
- Grouping content into more context-aware themes
- Cataloguing key threads into more usable formats
- And making the content on the home page more useful
Breaking down the above into more details. My plan is to leverage on tags as against categories as it is more flexible to manage and design around. Feverbee’s homepage design is based on tags. See here for more details on how tags were used. And tags are easier to manage as the community gets bigger.
On this, I may be changing some of the categories to tags over time. I am still not sure if I should change any or which to change. Although I know I should change the design category to a tag. It would make the design category bigger than what it is now. And make it easier to contribute to design ideas in different categories.
See the tags I plan to add based off my insights above:
- Opinions - Views and opinions on African Business and Tech
- Tips and Guides - Resources to help improve capacity and knowledge to do business and tech in Africa
- Opportunities - Non-commercial support or aid programs that contribute positively to the community and increase members’ business and tech capacity. I already added this as a category, but I will be changing it to a tag now.
I also want to add a Services tag under the Products category. It will help cater to the new forms of local businesses being built on social media platforms.
I will add a question/challenge type tag later on if these types of posts increase.
If you want to see all the current categories and what they are for, see here. If you are wondering what the longterm thinking around these changes is, see below:
Feverbee’s community also runs on Discourse.
Looking forward to what we all think about these changes.
@onyeka @yoowai @leslie @87_chuks @techscorpion @Diakon @Gbmillz what do you think?
