What's Wrong: topic
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Why the nature network will never be popular in its current state
Chris Grose
Saturday, 23 February 2008 08:06 UTC
For me the prospect of an online forum with particular appeal to scientists, academics and public intellectuals is very exciting. It would be wonderful to post up a problem I might be having running a geodynamics modelling code and have plenty of other geodynamicists on the other end interested in lending me their help and criticism, or to have another geochemist review my attempts at descritizing equations for isotopic fractionation and such. The spectator, scientist or student, might benefit also. I suspect that scientists communicate electronically mostly by means of e-mail and listserves which are far simpler mediums than the nature network currently is, albeit also more limited. For a long time i’ve envisioned an online forum akin to an incessant scientific conference, albeit less formal and punctuated by instances of scientific formality as desired by its participants. Particular ideas published and unpublished could be discussed and inter-disciplinary collaboration would probably be far easier than is current reality.
But let me try to make my criticism frank: the current interface and functionality of the nature network is, to me, horrifying (uncomfortable at best). I claim no particular ‘expertise’ in forum construction, but I’ve participated in a good many forums intellectual, scientific, and not over the last decade.
My first visit to this forum left me utterly confused as to what the hell I was looking at. It was utterly difficult to browse the available forums and reading threads is even more uncomfortable than attempting a competent dialogue on a myspace forum or a comment board on youtube. Basically you have 4 inches of content bounded by 5 inches of poorly arranged links which more often than not, do nothing to help me. It is no wonder when I finally located (by using the search box!!!) the geology groups/forums there were only 9 participants listed.
Of course I have no idea what the use is for the ‘group’ functionality, it sounds like a good means by which to connect and show what people are interested in but apparently group association is required for communication therein, but that is besides my general point here. In my opinion, navigation and the actual task of communication is relatively speaking a horribly daunting process. Why can’t I just open the home page and see a bulletin board style list of topical forums (Geology, Biology, Astronomy, Philosophy, General Discussion, etc. etc.), click on one and see a list of threads listed in order of the most recent post or simply go to a page with such a list for all forum threads. Perhaps after the nature network begins to become popular sub-categories and disciplines can be added, but for now things should be even more directly accessible.
Consider the interfaces of currently popular discussion boards:
http://www.evcforum.net
http://www.christianforums.com
http://www.sciforums.com
http://www.theologyweb.com
In my opinion, the evcforum.net interface is superior to others due to its straight forward simplicity and ease of navigation. Much of the current nature functionality could be both retained and improved by moving to a more straight forward interface such as one of these.
Until then, collaboration between scientists, students, etc. on the nature network will be difficult and tend to drive people away.
Anyways, does anyone else see the same?
Updated 23 February 2008 08:13 UTC
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Replies
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Yes, it’s very difficult to navigate, and it doesn’t remember where I’ve been. If I want to go back and look at places I’ve left comments, I have to guess where they were.
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Thanks for the provocative comments Chris. Many of the points you make are things we will be addressing over the next few months. I will briefly respond to some of your points here.
NN is deliberately set up to be different from other forum sites. Traditional sites have a small number of forums chosen from the start by the editor. We’ve turned that on its head by letting scientists create their own forums. This allows for many niche discussion groups, and those that wouldn’t fit into a ‘discipline’ catagory. It is a model successfully used on sites such as Facebook and Flickr.
This does, however, pose significant navigational challenges, as your comments reflect. You’re right – currently the best way to find a group of interest is to search. That’s just fine for some people, but not for others.
We do run subject catagories down the left hand margin of the Groups page. These (in theory) allow you to find groups within broad subject areas (e.g. clinical research, physical science…). However, I realise this is not particularly prominent, and the results returned are not always helpful. We know why that is, and are tweaking things to improve this.
We’re currently planning a redesign that should address many of your navigational criticisms. The confusion between ‘groups’ and ‘forums’ is common, so we’ll probably consolidate these. The layout will also be improved – I agree the central column is too narrow. And we’ll think carefully about how to organise subject areas and topics to make it easier to browse.
Thanks again for taking the time to make these points. We were on this road already, but you’ve given us a greater sense of urgency.
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Totally, the forums mentioned above have better navigation. Although nothing for urgency, but steps can be made towards a better navigating experience.
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Betsy, I’ll respond to your comment. Apologies for the delay. We will soon (in a few weeks) be launching new tabbed views on your network snapshot page that would allow you to see at a glance comments posted in response to your comments throughout the site (blogs, forums, etc). So that would be the way for you to go back to conversations you’ve started or participated in and to see what else other people have said since your last comment.
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On the whole I disagree with Chris’s comments. I like the way the NN site is structured and how it uses tags to link groups, fora and people together. For me NN is not primarily a discussion forum, but a way of bringing like-minded scientists together and perhaps to even broaden one’s own sphere of knowledge.
Having said that, if you do want to get down and discuss things in depth as part of a group/forum the NN thread format is not ideal. This has been mentioned before…
It may not be perfect at the moment, but the direction NN is going is the right one, IMHO. :)
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Thanks Chris. We’re getting there. The structure worked very well in the early days when we had far fewer users. Now we’re growing, we need to adapt the structures and display to best effect. And at the same time build the new tools and improvements that people are clamouring for—all on reasonably modest resources. The next three monthly releases will each see big changes to the site to address some of the more common criticisms.
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