Discussion Redesign Updates

SamGarza1 · ‎05-17-2024

For the past many weeks and months, my team and I have been seeking customer feedback for our ongoing redesign work for Discussion and Announcements. We have been on numerous calls with customers, engaged with users in the Canvas Community, had a usability study shared with us from the University of Minnesota (more on that at InstructureCon), and had ongoing conversations with early adopters. We have listened to that extensive feedback, and I am pleased to present the result of that exercise:

The first item we tackled and have delivered is the ability to see the unread counts to groups. We deployed this item on April 10th, and we have had positive feedback on that addition. If you have had any experience with this feature you feel is worth sharing, please add comments below.

Group drop down showing three group discussions each with their own unread count.

The next round of features that we’re working on is the ability to mark Discussions as read with One Click, and also to add a setting that disallows threaded replies.

GIF showing the read/unread indicator being marked and unmarked.

We're considering changing which date we sort on and want to get user input on this. Currently, it's the last date in the thread. Would users prefer the original behavior date of the original post? Let us know your preference and feedback on this idea.

Any and all comments below are welcome!

rmartini · ‎05-17-2024

I'm looking forward to future updates with the redesign! It's not widely used on our campus yet but I've done some testing of the unread counts for groups. It was a welcome addition but I'm still seeing issues with the display when the group name is longer (the unread count extends beyond the menu and overlaps other text). I added a comment about this to the 2024-04-10 Deploy Notes and opened a case with support (Case 10734133) that was escalated to engineering...so I'm hoping for a fix before July.

Unread count in group discussions is difficult to read when the group's name is longer

callinger · ‎05-20-2024

Additionally, that "unread" count is inaccurate when you're within a group discussion. For example, let's say I have 3 discussion groups, and all three groups have unread replies. When I'm at the main discussion, I can see how many unread replies are in each group, but as soon as I enter one group, the other two read as "0 unread."

This means that an instructor can't just see easily from group to group where the unread messages are; they have to keep going out to the main discussion to get an accurate count. Here's a video demonstration.