Hello gang! 
Riding on the back of our latest update, and the action points we’ve laid out there to improve the NEAR Governance Forum experience, I’m sharing this update to deliver a more in-depth plan for executing on those action points.
First thing’s first, let’s refresh on what the action points are:
Over the past ~ 2 weeks, I’ve been hosting additional feedback sessions with a handful of those who filled out the form. The resulting data further verified our assumptions that the above feedback is what needs to be addressed with high priority in order to improve the UX in the NEAR Governance Forum.
With that in mind, let’s dive a little deeper into what we’re going to do to improve the Forum experience.
Improve the Mobile UI
We’re working with the Open Web Sandbox to conduct a round of user testing for the mobile UI of the NEAR Governance Forum:
The data we extract from this will serve as the foundations for any decisions we make in regard to upgrading the mobile UI.
After we’ve captured the data and synthesised it, I’d love to work closely with a designer to improve the overall UX of the mobile governance forum (if you’re up for it, do shout out!)
h/t to the OWS team, thank you!
Breaking Down the Language Barrier
A big one, but definitely low-hanging fruit in terms of the effort required to overcome this.
We recently integrated this Discourse Translator add-on.
Currently, we’re blocked on this front as we require a third party service (Google Translate) before this goes live.
I’m hoping to get it up and running this week!
Gone are the days of copy and pasting threads to Google Translate, and for our non-native English Community members, we hope this grants you a smoother experience.
Finding relevant topics and information is difficult
A key theme throughout the survey, and something which was reinforced by the user research sessions, was the difficulty found when trying to navigate the forum.
As such, we’re going to review how users DISCOVER topics and NAVIGATE in the forum.
This includes:
- Investigating the potential of a forum reorganization
- Explore plugins that can improve search functionality
- Create an in-depth playbook for navigating and using the Governance Forum
- Explore the possibility of enabling ‘subscriptions’ to particular categories/tags
Additional Action Points
Below are a handful of other suggestions which came out of the user research surveys. Please do let me know if there’s anything else you think would be beneficial when it comes to improving the UX of the Forum as well as any feedback you have on these 
Video Guides
Everyone loves a video! Easy to digest and, if done correctly, very informative.
Would be interested to hear people’s thoughts on the creation of guides, I’m thinking of the following:
- How to submit a funding proposal
- How to submit a report
- ‘Getting started with the NEAR Governance Forum’
Drop-in sessions
An awesome suggestion that came about from a feedback session was the idea of drop-in sessions.
Similar to how we have drop-in sessions for developers and Guilds, we’d host drop-ins for community members (and anyone!) who has questions about how to get the most out of the forum.
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As always, we’d love to hear your feedback!