July 2021 Community Update!
Hello Community!
I hope you all are well. It is warm here and the summer season is winding down. I hope you all have had an opportunity to get some downtime and R and R in.
I’ll write a more detailed post soon, but wanted to share that we will soon be rolling out a new dashboard. It will look like the image below. The center will be something we are calling a growth feed. To start, this will focus on popular posts, notifications, alerts, and growth path steps. The next iteration will allow for personalization. For example, I sometimes struggle with anxiety, so my feed would feature posts from the anxiety sub-community and then also growth path steps that have been shown to help people overcome anxiety.
We are pretty excited about this new feature and will be releasing a similar feature in the app once we iterate on the Web.
Please let me know your thoughts and ask any questions in the comments below!
Heather (H)
Hello everyone! Thank you very much for filling out our Q3 Survey! We are sorting through responses to identify actionable items we will be implementing throughout this quarter. We plan to run these broad surveys at the beginning of each quarter and appreciate all of your help identifying ways we can better serve our community.
Back in May we launched the Daily Reveiws Campaign which seeks to highlight our listeners' everyday achievements. To continue to expand it, I have opened applications for Project Agents.
I’d like to congratulate @Listeningsarinn and @considerateParadise6717 for stepping up to boost our listeners’ signals! And as always, we encourage every listener to grab some reviews off the My Progress Path page and add them to the subforum! Every little bit helps, and you will receive cheers for participating!
And lastly, I want to point you all to an updated post on how to protect yourself from trolling on our platform here, which details the tools at your disposal to take care of yourself and each other.
Laiba
On the Academy front, we have been working hard to make people informed about the academy programs and what we have to offer. We launched the Academy PA role to support outreach for academy programs and to support alumni initiatives. Additionally we have been adding more activities such as ice-breakers to the academy sub-communities and making it a welcoming place for trainees, grads and interested users by doing weekly subscriber welcomes.
Moreover, the academy now has an academy hub room available to all academy trainees, grads and mentors. We inaugurated it with parties. The aim of this room is to give the academy folks a place to come together and connect with each other. In updates about programs, we updated the internship program to make it easier for the current interns and the future interns. Lastly, we onboarded @ouicherie as a mentor leader for Content Development and Marketing (CDM) Program and @competentParadise6344 joined us as an academy ambassador focusing on the Quality Listening Program. Both have been really dedicated and hardworking and we are excited to see the impact they make.
Obs
On the Verified Listener Program side, we are rolling out a change to facilitate Swift Scheduling and Processing of the VL Applications!. The change will be on a trial basis for now as we still have to figure out better ways and ensure faster processing of the applications.
We enabled a Search Box in the Community Calendar to help us sort the scheduled sessions as per the query run by an user.
On the Aging Up Program front, we made some progress and revived the initiative. If any transitioning teen needs help, support and guidance, please check here and reach out. Also, we onboarded 8 teen transitioning mentors and a bunch are in the process of getting onboarded.
On the Group support front, the major update is a couple of community moderators will be joining to help us provide support and help in the listener chat rooms and teen member rooms during selected busy hours. Also, removing the badges visibility for a number of badges to keep the messages sending flows efficient and swift. For more detailed updates, stay tuned in the Group Support Community!
SoulfullyAButterfly
On the content end of things, we have onboarded applicants who applied to the Q&A Approval Team (congratulate the team here) and the team has provided quick dedication to approve queued-up community answers. We are looking forward to announcing leadership for this content aspect, as well will be getting to approve community questions alongside these answer submissions. To join the team please click here.
We are also still interested in having users join the Lightship team for social media-based content outreach as well as support. If the leadership aspect of this area interests you, consider joining as one of our Lightship Assistants.
Our Translations Project continues to be another opportunity for those interested in globalizing mental health awareness and support: you can apply for either the app or site projects! We are specifically looking for leaders/translators for the following languages: Hindi, Chinese Simplified, French, French (CA) and Malay - several other languages are also available for contribution.
Evelyne
On the listener side, The Listener Coaching Team (LCT) has been seeing great strides as it continues it’s revamp under new team lead management. Mango3 has worked hard to make sure listeners are able to work on skill building, while @sia1325 has worked on leading the teen side of LCT by adding more Coaches to help listeners practice as well. Want to know more? Please read this post here.
@lueurspace and @Mango3 have been co-leading the Care Team, a special team dedicated to helping new listeners and checking up on those in listener rooms. Learn more here!
@RebekahRoyal and @MidnightRaven999 have been leading the Anonymous Evaluations Team that helps us keep listening quality up. @LuluRings leads the Feedback Team that delivers the feedback in constructive ways to help our listeners grow. Learn more here.
On the listening front, we are working on many behind the scenes processes to help improve listener quality. Once these are finalized, we will make announcements, but for now they are under development.
Thankyou for the updates @GlenM ! Go Community 🥳❤
Thank you so much for this update!
I'm not certain about the new dashboard, I might have to see it in action. From just the picture, it feels to me too similar to social media, which doesn't feel like a good thing. It also seems to have a lot going on, not sure how overwhelming it will be in actual practice. It's hard to see but also looks like the conversations that is usually on the left is now on the right, another thing you'd have to get used to...I use the site on my phone just through the web browser for the most part, so I'll have to see how functionally-friendly it is in that format. I guess with most new things, it'll just be something to get used to over time
@TaranWanderer I agree. Looks very cluttered to me, with no overall sense of design.
For example, one good design principle for laying out a page is the Z-pattern, which organizes information to match the way people's eyes habitually scan a page. This starts at the top left (except in Arabic and Hebrew, when it's the top right). So the thing that people most often want to use should be at the top left. In my case that would be my chat list—certainly not my profile picture! Forum notifications would be alongside, following the Z. But of course other people will have different usage patterns, so full personalization will be very welcome when it arrives. (Mine is already personalized.) I'm not convinced that a focus on diagnosis is going to be useful, though.
On a phone it's more difficult. Autopersonalization might work, meaning that the thing you used last is always at the top. Then the thing you used second-last will always be just below that, and so on. Things you never use will drift to the bottom. This could also work on desktop in a Z-pattern.
I don't know the purpose of this redesign, and it's not obvious to me from the image. I don't recall seeing requests for a redesign in the forum. Yet other changes are being requested in the forum over and over again. For example, the process for reporting listeners came up again a few days ago here: Introducing Verified Listeners' Behavior Tracking System. And the need to detect unresponsive listeners came up again just a couple of days ago here: Too many limitations.
Charlie
@TaranWanderer - Yes, agreed.
@GlenM
Thank you for the update!
Hi @GlenM and everyone,
Thank you for the update. I can't see the image clearly, but it looks like there will be upvote and downvote option for a post?
Hi @GlenM
Thanks for the updates. Can we get a link to a full-size preview please? The preview I see is a bit hard to make out where all the sections are and what the graphics look like. Thank you!
@GlenM
I believe the idea of modifying the dashboard that way is very helpful.
@GlenM I agree with some others that it looks a lot like social media and has lots of stuff going on. It can be overwhelming for people. Especially seeing that people coming on may be in a place to revive support or what this place is for. If people are seeking support having everything like that on the screen as soon as they enter the app may be overwhelming and hard for them and make their stress worse.as others have pointed out as well on a phone this may be hard to navigate. I use a phone a lot for this and it's hard to navigate somestimes so with moepre on the screen it may be hard. Thanks for reading.
@StarryMilkywaySystem not to mention many people have struggles directly related to social media (such as basing their value on how many likes/comments/upvotes/view/etc they have), so hopefully this new design doesn't invite too much of that in! I hope the amount of things on there feels different/not too much when actually using it vs just how it looks in a preview picture. Although I guess whenever you join something new, there will always be a lot to sort through and figure out no matter what. I'm looking forward to the possible customization so that people can choose what not to have (eg, people who don't like forums would never get anything out of forum updates). Seems like this new dash is most useful for team members who have roles they need to stay on top of, but maybe too much for just the average user. We'll have to see :)
@TaranWanderer maybe a better idea to add on to that is to have a option of the old one of new one in settings
Thank you for the update Glen
ThankYou for the update! Its a really good update and I think it will definitely help seekers out to have a better perspective of their concerns!
