Improvements To This Forum
I applaud the fact that Junxure has the "Prod Ideas" forum to allow public feedback. The fact that you're also providing responses in the open (e.g. "In Progress", "Under Review", "Will Not Implement") so that everyone can see what progress is taking place is also fantastic. Our firm is new to Junxure, but this practice is a huge confidence boost to us that you are looking to the future and that the product will continue to improve.
But I'd like to suggest a few improvements to the forum itself. As more users are contributing and more staff members are replying, the forum feels like it is quickly becoming less and less usable. I can only assume that Junxure will continue to grow and that the forum will continue to get more traffic, and I don't think it can handle it well (from a usability standpoint).
Here are the big hurdles:
1. The way the forum is displayed as a feed/timeline makes it easy for posts to get buried and (presumably) ignored. I'm seeing posts from last week that are being triaged/moderated (example
here) while there are numerous posts from the last few months that have received no response. See
here,
here, and
here for examples. Maybe I'm jumping the gun (admittedly, a few of the skipped ideas are my own) but it looks like these posts are being forgotten because they're at the bottom of the feed.
2. It is hard to distinguish responses from original posts when you're on the main "Prod Ideas" page. Again, the feed/timeline design of the page is at fault. Scrolling down the page, the only difference between an original post and a reply is the "last reply by..." text near the bottom of the post preview. That's really hard to pick out when you're scanning down the page and even when I do see it, I have no context to help me understand what came before or after it within that post thread. I still have to click through and see the whole thread to understand what's going on. In that sense, displaying replies on the main page isn't even really helpful. It just turns into noise.
My suggestion for these two problems is that a more traditional forum design would be far more helpful than the timeline/feed approach. See
here for an example.
Discourse would also be a great option. I get that you may be locked into a specific platform or something, but if there's any way to improve the design to look more traditional, I think it would make a huge improvement.
3. It is hard (impossible?) to distinguish authoritative moderators from user participants. In
this post it is evident that Shawn Etheridge is a moderator based on context, but you actually have to read the issue to understand that. A new user who was just scanning the main feed page might not realize that someone from Junxure was actually responding. At the very least could I suggest that staff members have a uniform avatar that makes it easy to see that they are staff. Use the same logo, place a badge over your picture...something to make it visually simple to pick out that the Junxure gods are speaking. :)
4. There are occasions where the product team responds on the forum requesting an offline meeting or call to discuss an issue. (See
here.) That's great but then the forum post appears to be abandoned. I had this happen with an issue that I submitted. I exchanged some emails with a client relationship manager (and I do appreciate that I was heard), but there's no clear feedback on what comes next just by looking at the forum. Is that issue dead? In progress? Under consideration for later implementation? The forum, which seems like the ideal place to track such info, gives no indication.