Check out mockups for the new Support Forums

The rewrite of the Firefox Support Forums is well underway. Chris Howse, UX designer for the Mozilla websites, has been working over the last couple weeks on making high-fidelity mockups to give us a taste of how the new forums will look and feel.

The first mockup shows how the questions and replies themselves will look. As you can see, users are now given the option to vote that they have a certain problem as well as vote on whether replies are helpful. To make sure that useful replies don’t get lost after other posts, they’re being summarized below the question. We’ve also moved stuff like System information to the sidebar, adding in tags and related questions to help improve navigation between forum questions. This way, if you’re looking for help with something, you can easily find similar threads if the one you’re looking at doesn’t help. Also, if you’re answering this thread, you may find that you also know the answer to a related question.

We’ll also color certain replies differently: The chosen solution is highlighted in green, posts by the original question-asker are blue and other threads are white.

The second mockup shows how the thread listing will look. To make it easier to browse the forum and find questions you can help with, we’ve added tags, the number of “I have this problem” votes and most importantly a short summary to this view. You’re also shown if you’ve contributed to the thread already and what its status is. We’ve kept the filter buttons at the top, letting you view common views (most recent, solved only etc).

Chris Howse has made many more detailed mockups showing various views and button states. You can check them all out in the following two bugs:

We hope you enjoyed this view into the future of the forums. What do you think? We’ll give another update as more development happens, so stay tuned.

One comment on “Check out mockups for the new Support Forums”

  1. AlleyKat wrote on

    Very good, looking forward to it – much wasted space on current page and not very good overview.