Early/ Mid-March: Sub-Community Navigation & Discovery Updates

This post was written in collaboration with @krinkthemellowunicorn !

Hello Lovely community!

I am excited to announce that we are working on some improvements to Community onboarding (first-time experience) and navigation. In this post, I will highlight these updates and provide as much information as I can about what we are thinking. Please keep in mind that what is presented in this post may change, but we wanted to let you all know what we are thinking and give you a general idea of what to expect with this update!

Purpose of the update:

------> Update the main sub-community landing page to be more relevant for each individual

------> Make it easier for new users to find sub-communities and connect with them

------> Create a central hub for you to find important community information like: alerts, 7 Cups feed posts, recent blog posts, Group support events...etc and more!

To give you a better idea of what this will look like, wed like to show you the below mockup It mixes some existing elements with some planned or outlined updates. Please keep in mind that the ideas presented in this image may change.

Short version (top-only) of new-persons view of Community home page:

Full example (also new user view):

One thing you will notice in looking at this mock-up is that is looks similar to traditional sub-community pages, with forums down the middle and additional resources and content up top and along the side bars.

Step one in this change is to update the old Subcommunities page to an initial version of this mock. We have actually already done that, since that page wasnt going anywhere as it was. The mock shows some aspects of that page that are in still in progress.

The mock shows the page if you have not joined any communities yet. If you have your communities will be shuffled to the top of the list on the left side, the group chat area will show chat rooms from your communities, and the forum highlights in the middle column will come from your communities.

We plan to add a recommended communities feature to this page as well.

We have a few more community related elements to add to this design (such as the calendar), but once we have a full-fledged home page for all things community here we plan to replace the full community menu with a single Community link up top to this page.

Think of this as a hub-and-spokes model with the Community home pointing to all the (sub)communities and their community pages pointing to their chats, forums, listeners, leaders,etc. The last piece of the navigation puzzle is to make the spokes point both ways (mixing metaphors here…), so that for example if you are in a group support chat about anxiety or reading a Q&A answer about anxiety or posting in an anxiety forum it should be easy to find your way from any of those places to the Anxiety community hub. Well be adding all those back links.

After this, we want to work on helping new 7 Cups members and listeners discover the community and get involved.

Some things well be working on next.:

------> Right now, when a new member joins the site, we do not do a good job of showing them sub-communities and explaining what they are. The onboarding for new users will more deliberately invite people to visit group chat, read forums, and join communities.

------> Were thinking of adding community-exploration steps to the growth path and listener progress path.

------> Auto-subscribing new community visitors to some core communities for them. (For example a new member who has selected depression as an issue they are struggling with could be added automatically to the Depression subcommunity.

------> On your first visit to the community page (the one discussed above), we will show you a welcome modal to help new folks get oriented and learn their way around.

We are excited to share this update with you! Please ask any questions and share your feedback! :)