NEAR Governance Forum Revamp: Survey Results and Action Points

Hello NEARverse!

It’s time for an update on the NEAR Governance Forum Revamp Plan:

I’m thrilled to say that we had an awesome response to the survey that was shared and sent to forum users. We gathered more than 70 responses which we’ve synthesised into some beautiful data which have sculpted the action points which will be shared below.

General Feedback

Let’s start on a positive note; we got some wonderful feedback from our Community regarding why they use the forum and what they like :tada:

Why Do People Use the NEAR Governance Forum?

The main drivers for forum usage were:

  • To keep updated with the NEARverse
  • To learn
  • For finding opportunities
  • To manage and engage in DAOs
  • For sharing updates

We received some positive feedback on the accessibility and openness of the forum.

You can find the highlights of the synthesis on our public Trello board here:

“Engaging with the NEAR Forum is Easy”

The majority (56%) of those who filled out the survey agreed, or strongly agreed, that engaging with the NEAR Forum is easy. On the inverse, 17.7% of forum users disagree, or strongly disagreed, that this was the case.

This question will be asked again in phase ∞ of the Governance Forum Revamp plan. We’ll be using the results from this genesis survey as a baseline to measure the impact of the action points.

Net Promoter Score

We incorporated a question into the survey to derive a NPS.

“On a scale of 0-10, how likely are you to recommend the NEAR Forum to a friend or NEAR user?”

For those unfamiliar with NPS, here’s a great overview:

We should strive to ensure our NPS is always within the 9-10 region. Anything less than that may be detrimental to the organic growth of the NEAR Forum.

Drum roll

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Our NPS score is: 8

There’s still work to be done by leveraging the insights and actions below, but this is a great start to be building from.

Insights and Actions

We’ve synthesised the data and derived three core insights:

The mobile UI doesn’t offer a user-friendly experience

In the past month, we have, on average, 59 unique visitors to the forum via mobile devices per day.

As we continue to grow, it’s essential to hear the calls for an improved UI/UX on mobile devices.

Proposed Action: Review the mobile app UI to understand what the issues are. Explore a solution, and perhaps work with a designer, to improve the UI.

Launguage barrier prevents total inclusion

A number of responses highlighted the difficulty of engaging with the forum when the responders first language wasn’t English.

NEAR is global, and our Governance Forum should be too.

Proposed Action: Thankfully this one is just a matter of time away from being solved. We’ve integrated a plugin that will automatically translate posts. This should be up and running in the coming weeks.

Finding relevant topics and information is difficult

This is the most prevalent piece of feedback we received.

People use the forum and want to use the forum, but the biggest barrier to accessibility is the search function, categorisation, and general taxonomy of the platform.

Proposed Action: Review how users DISCOVER topics and NAVIGATE in the forum. Formulate a solution in the form of a forum reorganisation. Explore whether there are plugins that improve the search functionality.

Next Steps

If you completed the NEAR Governance Forum Survey and agreed to a follow up call then you may be contacted today to arrange a call for sometime next week.

Following the calls, we’ll synthesise the data we receive to refine the action points above and, if necessary, add additional action points.

:warning: Nothing above, particularly the action points, is final just yet. If you’ve a solution which you think would fit better, please do share!

Thank you :tada:

11 Likes

Thank for report dear David.

5 Likes

LOVE to see it! Thanks to everyone who filled out the survey and props to @David_NEAR & Ken for synthesizing this beautiful data.

A+++ to this as it’s been a huge critique from many in the past that finding information has been hard on the Forum.

Thanks for the update, David! Keep up the awesome work :muscle:t4:

2 Likes

Hi, For example:

  1. Is there a plugin that allows us to reorganize/categorize the bookmarks? The categories/tags that the NEAR forum has are not enough, they refer to projects or guilds. Folders can be created or tagged within the user’s profile?, using categories/tags of their own design. Have the bookmarks classified by folder/tags. It would be the beginning to have a large list of classified/ordered bookmarks. :grinning:

  2. A solution for more efficient for search function would be to incorporate keyword matching when creating a post or replying to another post. Keywords are added by the publisher or respondent, which “no” may necessarily be in the inserted text. Maybe this is a bad idea, it is to add another complication to the post editor!.

My experience after having 27 days here in the NEAR forum:
Who seeks finds!, if you invest a lot of time, and patience!. I’m still looking for things and can’t find them. It happened to me at the beginning with the word Glossary; now I think it is no longer a problem. Certainly, that I might ask. Sometimes I don’t do that. Some I get by chance. Some interesting topics are discovered from outside by the help of the community, which you share links through Discord, Telegram, Twitter, etc., or by the mentions that some colleagues make us.

1 Like

Hey! GM,

This is the main plugin I’m going to pursue to address this issue:

TL;DR - documentation which sits directly in Discourse. Expect it to include how-to guides for anything and everything, including finding information.

Further to that, a general overhaul of how things are organised is needed IMO. But, one for a later date, as the focus is on Wiki atm.

Alas, the search function of Discourse is super restrictive. When this initiative is revived we’ll take another look into it :100:

Thank you for the feedback! :heart:

2 Likes