Like everyone else posting here, we’ve had a considerable amount of complaints from both faculty and students about the new discussion experience. It doesn’t look like Instructure has any interest in going back to the original design so we’ve been looking at ways we can customize the UI to clear up some of the issues.
I thought I’d share them here in case it can help anyone else, or to possibly get some of these improvements implemented. If you have any feedback or questions, please let me know in the comments.
Inline View - Starting State
- The main reply posts have a border to separate them and to keep any replies grouped together visually.
- The button icons provide natural dividers so we removed the bars. I’ve also put them back in their original order to keep “Reply” in a consistent place throughout the UI.
- In inline view, the Show/Hide replies button always displays with text, making it extra clear what the button does.
Inline View - Replies
- We’ve added a light gray background for all replies. This keeps them grouped together visually and provides a clear indication of when the next post starts
- I agree with other posters that this All Expanded view should be the default starting state to encourage student participation. We’ve done dev work to get this behavior in place, but it would be great if we didn’t need that workaround.
Split Screen View - Starting State
- In split screen view the replies button looks the same as in the inline view, but it behaves very differently. The chevron and show/hide language is no longer relevant, so we replace them with an arrow pointing to the right. We continue this pattern for further replies in the split screen tray.
Split Screen View - Reply Tray
- In the split view tray, the “10 Replies, 6 Unread” no longer has functionality so we give it a different style from the Reply and Mark as Read buttons.
- Replies to replies use the same design patterns.
