How to improve a Discourse community forum

This is a quick personal project for the redesign of the public forum www.forum.trezor.io.

Tool: Figma

Time: 5 days

This forum serves as a public community place for the users of Trezor hardware wallet. Users can discuss any technical issues they might be facing, create new topics and send personal messages.

Since the forum's launch, I have been a daily user and a moderator as part of the tech support team for Trezor. The forum is running on the Discourse platform. This platform is specially designed for public forums and is used by many companies.

The current design is based on the predefined templates created by discourse or the community that follows the specified Discourse rules. These templates are customizable to some extent, however, this brings visual design limitations.

As a daily user and part of the team that owns this project, I have seen several UX issues over time. This exploration is based on these observations, brainstorming with the team and talks with users.

The main pain points are:

1. Topic categories: users often come to the forum and start a new topic instead of looking for similar ones already created. This leads to duplicating and cluttering of the forum. Categories should be more prominent and lead users to the right place.

2. Search: Users do not use the search enough and create new topics first. Make the search more prominent and connect it to Trezor's knowledge base that will immediately offer solutions.

3. Overall UI style: Since the predefined templates are used, they are very limited in terms of customization, so the forum does not meet the style guide of other Trezor websites.