Clarity in forum landing pages

[Peter Villevoye]

Why is it that when I go to any product's forum landing page e.g. http://forums.adobe.com/community/indesign, it's so hard to eventually find the list of Discussions ! There's a huge heap of Help resources and other more or less related navigational stuff, sometimes an undistinguishable mention of (some) popular forum categories, and a few traces of the most recent discussions. But only by typing search terms and jumping from the prompts, or taking a detour from the "Recent" list down below, I can get to the top level page of the Discussions.

I do understand and appreciate that this approach might assist a first or casual forum visit, but a routined forum member probably prefers a more direct inroad to the Discussions.

By now, every type of support page has turned into a vast buffet of all and more or less redundant help resource available at Adobe. The main website's product feature page, the HelpX pages that used to mimic the all-covering manuals, the Forum landing pages, even the AdobeTV pages take their bite into the giant amount of available video's (but not all...) along with other resources.

I realize that with so much overlap in resources and products, it's hard (or just plain stupid) to stick with a truly hierarchical structure for all available types of support and material. The total array of all information is like a beautiful ever-growing diamond. But at least each typical entry (as mentioned as a link, menu or even URL) should and could be clear on that specific facet of this gem.

[Jacob Bugge]

Peter,

This is a know limitation, often pointed out here.

My solution is to make Bookmarks with the Discussion page, and to set the number of threads shown to 100, using an addition. For this forum it looks like this,

http://forums.adobe.com/community/general/forum_comments?view=discussions#/?per_page=100

with the addition underlined.

You may also find that the Back button will (often) have to pressed twice to acuatlly get back to the discussion page from a thread. Unless I wish to return to a subsequent Discussion page, I always click the Bookmark to return.

[Peter Villevoye]

Thanks for your quick and kind reply.

Let's hope Adobe staff has good reasons (other than just technical ones) to have decided on the design of the Forum landing pages the way they are now. Maybe they have discovered that newbies appreciate to find this kashba of support on every corner of the Adobe Knowledge Base...

[Jacob Bugge]

You are welcome, Peter.

[Peter Villevoye]

Hey, I noticed it even gets weirder.

When I'm eventually in the list of Forum Discussions and click one level higher up in the breadcrumb trail (second to the top level, expecting to arrive back in the whole Help enchilada), I remain in the Discussions List section. I have to click the large heading above it (which doesn't look as if it's a link at all), to go back to the original landing page of that application or topic. The breadcrumb trail doesn't reflect that navigation.

So it's difficult to get into the Forum Discussions, and also difficult to get out of it.

It's all becoming a bit fishy, isn't it ? I understand why users get lost...