Week of August 31th: Provide feedback on a new home page design

[Wilder]

Hello HubSpot Community:

This week, I want to share a new design we are thinking about for the home page. It is just a wireframe. Nothing fancy (yet). The goal is to eventually make it easy to find and get access to all the great content we plan to add to the website before the end of the year.

So tell us what you think about this new design.

Some questions to consider when answering:

• What do you think you would do first?
• What do you think you would click on?
• Is there anything missing? Is there anything else you would want us to add? Remove? Edit? 

Home Page

Thoughts?

Thank you again for helping us design a new Community experience.

- Wilder

[JessicaH]

Hi @Phil_Vallender @Ben_M @dianalcont @Florie_HM @Trumeter @ojobson @IanGuiver @SeanHenri @Josh @StefaniUAT, I wanted to bring this post to your attention. I'm sure you have some great feedback.

Thanks!

Jess

[BootstrapC]

Thank you for the opportunity to provide feedback. Below are some thoughts I had.

1. "Start a discussion" vs "ask a question" These seem to conflict eachother. When would you click one and not the other because sometimes a question can start a discussion. Maybe if you want to have more discussions on a topic, you could have weekly or monthly discussion topics. Kind of like reddit ask me anything.
2. Currently what do most people associate the community for? A forum to ask questions or something greater? What would draw people back to the community on a regular basis? I am assuming the forum and ability to ask questions. If this is still the case in the future, I would have "Ask an expert" above "get inspired"
3. Consider adding a "featured content" section towards the top that a moderator could share things that should be noted like events, top questions, new how tos. 
4. Community member spotlight - it would be nice to have an interview style page on HubSpot employees or community members that look into how and why they are using HubSpot
5. If you could pick one feature/section of the community what would it be? Right now I can't tell what that is.

Jacob Lett

[Wilder]

@BootstrapC 

Good am!! Thank you for the great feedback.

All good points. Especially #1. Sometimes we are so close to our work. Communities make that mistake: confusing users between 'start a discussion' vs. 'ask a question'.

#Re: The other points: #2. Makes sense. #3. Good call on 'Featured Content.' #4. Nice add.

Thank you again.

If you think of anything else, let me know.

See you in the Community.

- Wilder

[finn]

Where are the Ideas section in this mockup?

A bit blunt, but I don't think that the current site is broken, so maybe don't fix it.

If you wanted to put energy into something that many users seem frustrated with then it should be rather about increasing communication and response rate when users bring up new ideas, upvote ideas and plead for (sometimes basic) new functionality that they cannot get in Hubspot. Put efforts into having that each product manager must answer all threads within her/his area of functionality, at least once per week. Stay close to your customers this way. Nothing more frustrating than a great idea where the last time a Hubspot product manager responded was in April.

[Wilder]

@finn:

I am from New York, so I appreciate bluntness : ). We have some additional and (what we believe) useful content we are adding to the site so we are trying to figure out how to make this information easy to find, easy to leverage, etc.

Re: Your comment about 'Ideas.' Let me follow up with the team. We are making some changes which should help with this. Will update you asap.

Thanks again,

- Wilder

[Fra]

Hi !

Great to ask for opinions 😉

I don't quite see it on the wireframe, but I think having a more direct access to the posts per category would be interesting to catch attention.

I can see the posts in the 'latest posts from the community' section on the actual homepage, but the top part of the page only leads to the categories without insight on the content you could get.

We helped making this community lately (in French), it is an exemple of what I'm trying to explain 😉 They have carousels showing the latest posts, some visuals..

https://communautes.cultura.com/t5/CulturaLivres/ct-p/culturalivres

Hope it helps 😉

Francesca

[Wilder]

@Fra 

Hi there. Great feedback. Definitely think we need to make it easier to see 'recent posts.' .. and to highlight better the content you get. Thank you! I checked out the website you told me about. Nice design. I like the Blog page. 

Thank you again,

- Wilder

[jnix284]

@Wilder  I too am curious about the Ideas forum - it has been one of the most helpful resources for getting HubSpot to hear ideas from our team and finding solutions that make using HubSpot better for everyone. 

With all the work @Eugenia has put in with customer advocacy and champion users, I'm wondering why that doesn't have a more predominant role in the new site design / content - at least it is not evident in the wireframe alone.

[Wilder]

@jnix284  Hi there.

Ideas will be highlighted on the home page. We are thinking about creating a new Product and Ideas area where you can not only find the Ideas forum but also find links about product updates, etc. It's great to hear that you find Ideas useful. @JoeMayall , who has been managing that area of the site, will appreciate the positive feedback. 

Good call about Advocacy and Champions. We will figure out how to highlight that more too. 

Keep the comments coming!

Wilder

[REM-USA]

I like the concept and would prefer a configurable dashboard concept where the user can decide what items are important when launching the new "HubSpot Home" screen.

[sharonlicari]

Hey @piersg @Krystina@mike-ward @AdamLPW @Lucila-Andimol @EmmaWashington @willsmith @Ben_M  @dianalcont   any feedback you would like to share with @Wilder? 

Thank you 🙂

Sharon

[mike-ward]

Thanks for involving us!

I just have a couple of very general points:

1. Do most users access the community on mobile or desktop? Are there different behaviours based on that, and therefore how would that impact the design of the homepage? I'd imagine there are some pretty standard flows, what are the most common ones?

2. What do the heart and comments icons do underneath each section?  I'm a little unclear as to what is actually shown in each section. Appreciate this is a very early stage wireframe, but it's a little hard to visualise.

3. Is the idea to use carousels or have 'show more' for other sections? 

Agree with the other posts above re: Featured Content that is easy and quick to highlight and something to highlight the people aspect (Community Spotlight or something) - it should feel like it's a place populated with real people, not just a list of questions and answers. Overall I think it could be a little more visual, admit this is a tricky trade off, because it does need to be functional too.

Think it'll be a bit easier for us here to provide feedback when it's fleshed out a little more, it's a bit tricky at this very early stage.

Are there other changes happening beyond the home page? Or is the core community functionality staying the same? Things like additional post meta-data (like subscription type!) and better filtering would be top of my list there, but appreciate that is not probably part of this process 😄

Cheers,

Mike

[Wilder]

@mike-ward 

I really like the comments you and the other Members are providing.

I hear you -- we might have shared with you designs that are not polished enough -- that are too rough.

See answers below:

1. Do most users access the community on mobile or desktop? Are there different behaviours based on that, and therefore how would that impact the design of the homepage? I'd imagine there are some pretty standard flows, what are the most common ones? Wilder:  The goal is to have a responsive design (as much as we can, but we might be limited a bit by our platform : (.  We will also try to optimize for the most standard user flow.

2. What do the heart and comments icons do underneath each section?  I'm a little unclear as to what is actually shown in each section. Appreciate this is a very early stage wireframe, but it's a little hard to visualise.  Wilder: The heart represents if someone liked it. There should be a number next to it to show how many people liked it. As mentioned above, you might be right -- that we need these to be more polished to get proper feedback. (We are all learning : )

3. Is the idea to use carousels or have 'show more' for other sections? 

Wilder: Note that each of the middle sections could be personalized by the user. For example, you might only want to see information related to Service Hub, so you could set up the Home Page to show that sort of information. We are still investigating different ways to handle this.

Agree with the other posts above re: Featured Content that is easy and quick to highlight and something to highlight the people aspect (Community Spotlight or something) - it should feel like it's a place populated with real people, not just a list of questions and answers. Overall I think it could be a little more visual, admit this is a tricky trade off, because it does need to be functional too. Wilder: Great point. One of our goals is to humanize the site more.

Think it'll be a bit easier for us here to provide feedback when it's fleshed out a little more, it's a bit tricky at this very early stage. Wilder: Yep. We will keep you in the loop as this project moves forward.

Are there other changes happening beyond the home page? Or is the core community functionality staying the same? Things like additional post meta-data (like subscription type!) and better filtering would be top of my list there, but appreciate that is not probably part of this process 😄 Wilder: Yes, there are changes planned beyond the Home Page. I will share in the coming weeks.

Thank you for the great honest feedback,

Wilder

Cheers,

Mike

[karstenkoehler]

Hello @Wilder,

One thing I'm missing is an easy way to access language versions of the HubSpot community. I mainly active in the German community, but I browse English posts and sometimes check the Spanish section. I know of the workaround that @JessicaH has in her signature (go to settings > change language) but I'd love for this to be more straight forward (e.g. menu items that take me directly to another language version of the community).

Thanks for involving the community!

[Wilder]

@karstenkoehler 

Great point. I had this problem too : ). I like to dabble in the Spanish language site. Will add to our list. 

- Wilder

[GusJim]

Qué tal Wilder, es un muy buen trabajo, tiene orden y estructura amena y útil para buscar información, mi sugerencia es en el sentido deldiseño, me gustaría ver ilustraciónes y más colores. Saludos!

[Wilder]

@GusJim 

Hola -- Gracias por echarle un vistazo al diseño.

Si, eventualmente compartiremos paginas adicionales, con colores, etc. 

Vuelve y busca actualizaciones futuras.

Gracias,

Wilder

[GalT]

Thank you for the opportunity to provide feedback.

One of the many cases that I find it a bit of waste is that when you’re searching for a feature, or how-to’s and you find 2-5 different discussions asking about creating this option. I think that it will be a good solution to kind of merge it or make it easier to find based on main keywords, of idea. This way the conversation will be stronger.


I would also have "Ask an expert" above "get inspired" as this is the most usage button in the community.

Also, What are the heart and comment do in each section? If the section present more than one article or event than the heart and comment are useless because you’ll get mixed information here. Think that you have different items in the same box so the overall heart and comment on the box is not relevant, but a heart and comment for each line of article.

Gal Tarrab Levi

[Wilder]

@GalT 

Thank you again! Automatically merging conversations is tricky. To be honest, I am not sure how to do this on our platform unless we do it manually. I do agree, though, that merging would help. 

Re: Ask The Expert. I will follow up on this.

Thank you again. Have a great weekend!

Wilder

[ashfeller]

Hi Wilder,

This mockup looks great! 

My one recommend would be to sort the information base on the users interest. There are so many different features of HubSpot. In our organization, our roles are pretty specfic. When I log onto the community board I'd really only interested in seeing information on the Marketing Hub.

[Wilder]

@ashfeller 

Hello from California. Good recommendation. We are looking at having the ability where you can personalize your home page (and other pages) so you can control what content you see. Stay tuned! More on this in the next month or so. 

Thank you! Have a great weekend.

Wilder

[Music_Man]

Submission progress

After submitting a feature request, it would be amazing to have those on your individual homepage and to easily hover over each personal submission to see it's progress.

[Wilder]

@Music_Man (I like that name !)

I like the idea, but that one might be a bit of a challenge to implement.  However, I will look into it. 

Happy HubSpotting!

Wilder

[Music_Man]

Thank you. I thought it was fitting since we are an in-store music company.

Understood. I can see how that could be harder to implement.

Thank you for the quick reply, Wilder. I appreciate it.

[ChaosFreak]

Why don't you stop changing the "look and feel" of things that already work, and start fixing things that are badly, badly broken and develop basic CRM features that HubSpot has lacked for years but still hasn't developed. There's a treasure trove of those features in this community, but you never seem to develop any of them.

To be honest, my company sorely regrets moving from Salesfore.com to HubSpot. HubSpot is clearly not a serious CRM tool. You care more about things "looking pretty" than providing actual, useful features for your users. In Salesforce.com you can customize almost anything, and there's always a way to make something work if you're willing to dive deep. In HubSpot, you can't dive deep because it's all surface, no substance.

For example, for an "email marketing tool" you'd expect that in HubSpot I can change the wording of an email based on a contact's property. Simple examples of this are adding a paragraph for non-US contacts, or using different wording for "premium" customers, inserting a personalized URL, etc. Even Microsoft Outlook MailMerge can do this, but the "CRM tool" HubSpot cannot. This was reported back in 2016 but, of course, you've ignored it. The "workaround" is to create a separate list for each segment of contacts who needs slightly different wording, then send separate emails. Consolidating the results of those emails would be a nightmare, not to mention that if the emails are part of a sequence, you'd need to replicate the entire sequence for every small change you want to make.

Another big problem we have is that, when we test survey forms, there's no way to delete the test submissions. That data stays there forever, skweing our analytics. We have to export the results to Excel and analyze them using Pivot Tables because the HubSpot data is unreliable. Again, this has been reported in this forum back in 2017 but has been, as usual, ignored by you.

Over and over again this happens. Whenever I try to do something new with HubSpot, I'm always waiting for some kind of "this doesn't work" or "you can't do that" obstacle to pop up, preventing me from achieving my goals.

So, my advice to HubSpot... if you have time and money to create "wireframes" of pretty new home pages, STOP DOING THAT and start working on these critical, missing features. Maybe then you can begin to close the gap with Salesforce.com.

[Wilder]

@ChaosFreak 

Thank you for taking the time to share your feedback with us. As someone who is relatively new to HubSpot (I joined in July), I appreciate hearing from all users who are in the Community, whether their sharing information on what they like or voicing their concerns. I always tell the team -- we are all here to learn and figure out how to create great products for our customers. The only way we can ensure we are improving our tools is by receiving feedback.

While HubSpot has always been focused on the product's ease of use and has prioritized creating something that is prescriptive and helpful over completely customizable, we do want to ensure we are building tools that are useful for our diverse and growing customers. While we have work to do in this area, we are making small improvements, such as account-based marketing and multi-touch revenue attribution reporting. Also, be on the lookout for additional features we plan to release.

I noticed you’ve also posted in the Ideas Forum so please know that these sorts of requests do get to our product team. The ideas Forum is one of their main sources of ideas for how our product grows and evolves. They review each and every idea. As you can imagine, we receive many requests for new features, etc. These have to be reviewed, prioritized, and eventually implemented, which takes time. The person who coordinates this process, who is a member of the product team. If you have any specific feedback around how the product teams can improve their responses on the Ideas Forum, Joe is your point of contact!

I want to again thank you for using the Community platform to share your product feedback. One of my goals is to make it even easier for our customers to get answers to their product related questions and on improving the lines of communication between HubSpot employees and our customers on the Community. This is something Joe is helping me with so hopefully you will see significant improvements in this space. 

Thank you again for your feedback. Please feel free to drop me a line if you’d like to chat further about the Community, or if I can help in any way.

Wilder

[finn]

I agree with the sentiment. The community forum is not broken; don't fix it. What is broken is:

1) there are a LOT of basic functionalities missing from especially Sales Hub and Service Hub. Basic things that not only should be relatively straight forward to do for a company of Hubspot's size but also is readily available as "table stakes" in all kinds of competitive offerings including Salesforce.com (for CRM/service), Calendly (for meetings), Pandadoc (for quotes), Zendesk (for service), Kustomer (for service). This makes Hubspot look like poor value for money, when I cannot customize a quote template but have to live with Hubspot's own favorite template, not get a list of which people responded to a sequence, not use my own domain for documents, not apply my own user authentication to the knowledgebase, not run CES surveys in any other language than English, not allow to reschedule meetings and much more. In my company we have a list of about 60 new functionalities we would like to see in Hubspot of which 25 are things that we are really pulling our hair out of why Hubspot hasn't delivered basic stuff that all the competition seems to easily be able to.

2) Many of the basic functionalities have been on the ideas forum for years! and the Hubspot product team is far far away from having any meaningful dialogue with customers on the forum. It feels quite common on the threads that I follow, that Hubspot product team members chime in maybe once every 6 months, at best, only to say that they are not planning to do something about this in this current quarter, or that it is in "planning". It is almost a dirty word that has come to mean "we may make another post next year about this". Also, I can imagine that it can be annoying as a product manager or other Hubspot community member to not have anything new to say on a topic due to internal priorities, but if a customer tags a specific person/name on the community forum, then answer that day/week, even saying you have nothing new, instead of ignoring it (plenty of examples of this if you browse the various posts - if you cannot find them, I would be happy to find them for you).

I know the above sounds like frustration. Because it is. There are so many nice things in Hubspot and the overall vision is great. But it is truly frustrating when many Sales/Service basic functionalities are not working like it is 2020, and when it the community ideas forum feels like speaking to a closed door.

So I concur with @ChaosFreak. In the past week I have seen considerably more posts from @wilder about to change the UI of the general community forum than I have from product managers respond to any of the more than 50 idea posts that I follow. Stop painting the community forum yet another new color but instead spend Hubspot resources on improving the content AND responses on the ideas forum. And increase resources so that all the basic functionalities you are missing in Sales and Service Hub get up-prioritized.

[Wilder]

@finn 

Thank you for taking the time to leave us your feedback. As I mentioned in my earlier post, this sort of information helps me -- the new guy -- get up to speed on what’s important to our HubSpot customers.

In reading your email, a few things come to mind:

1. The Community Development Team has a different skill set than the team working on our products. So, unfortunately, we can’t just reallocate those resources to our product development group.
2. The product team not only reviews all posts in the Ideas forum, but also looks at customer feedback from other channels. The challenge for them is to evaluate and prioritize all the different inputs we get from our customers.
3. Our Ideas Forum Manager @JoeMayall is constantly feedback and ideas from the forum to the product team -- ensuring they are up to date on the latest feedback. 

Bottom line: I completely hear your frustration and know that it can be tiresome to see a feature not be moved forward for development, but please know that we are listening to you. 

Thank you again for taking the time to reach out to me.

Wilder

[ChaosFreak]

@Wilder  I don't think @finn was literally suggesting that you reassign people from community development to work on product. He was making a point that HubSpot should be prioritizing fixing glaring product deficiencies in the product over spending money, resources and time on redesigning the community portal, which is working fine. In other words, we're saying we wished HubSpot cared as much about the usability of its core product as it does about the usability of the community forum.

BTW, where are these "Product Team" people you speak of? They haven't chimed in yet. When I do see them on these forums it's usually to say "we may consider this feature for a future release" and then there's crickets for the next two years.