A new look and upcoming changes to the Arm Community

 A new homepage for the community

As you have probably noticed by now, we have a new design for our community homepage. The single biggest change is that we now have content showing at the top level, which we did not before. In 2020 the homepage was our most visited single page in the whole community. So where there are the most eyeballs, that is where we want our important content to be visible. There are three types of information on this page:

1. Space to promote content that is useful to our community audience. Whether it be community updates, Arm events or product launches, we can now use the homepage to share the information with you. Currently, we are leading with a blog about how to get started in the community for new members. In the future we can start talking about Arm DevSummit, or tell you about our amazing Innovation Coffee YouTube series, led by Robert Wolff. Ultimately we want to use Community to connect you to Arm events that we think you care about.
2. Of course, one of the most important parts of an external community is making sure it is easy to get to where you want to go. With that in mind we have created a section that leads to all of the forums that we have in community today. To the right of that section, we have a Quick Links menu that takes you to the main sections of our community. It also links to a couple of external locations that may be of interest to you. If you think there is something useful that we can add to the list, then let me know in the comments.
3. Finally, but perhaps most importantly, we have community content. Today, we are pretty much made up of forums and blogs, and both are now represented on our homepage. Most visitors to our blogs either walk in off the web, or they have followed a link from somewhere. Now we are showing the latest posts to where we have the most traffic. Going forward, I would like to refine this further, maybe showing blogs on a topic, or maybe the most read posts in the last 30 days. Again, if you have thoughts or questions about that then please leave a comment.

Now we come to forum content. We have added two sections focused on forum content, one is ‘Your questions’ which only appears if you have asked a question in the community. This is designed to give you one way to quickly access the questions you have asked. On top of that, we have added space for all currently unanswered questions from across the community and we called it ‘Can you help?’. The reason for this is to create an opportunity for a member to help someone answer a question. We already have some amazing members who do this regularly, and we want to grow the spirit of peer-to-peer support across the community.

This is the first step to creating a more useful community homepage to our members. We evolve our approach as we learn more about what is performing well and what is not. For reference, we looked at communities like Sophos, Atlassian, and Salesforce Trailblazers to help inform our thinking. However, this community is for you, and if you have any feedback on what we can improve, then please leave a comment.

Upgrading

We are in the process of upgrading the version of the community software that we use from Verint. Noticeably it fixes the issue with the search bar in the global navigation not accepting characters without kicking you out. You should not notice any changes to the user interface of the community. We will provide a complete update of changes to the community when we have completed the upgrade.

Site restructure

We want to align closer to our sister platform, Arm Developer. This means site structure, choice of naming conventions, use of tagging and user experience. In summary we plan to:

• Move all forums to one location under one primary group. This removes layers and clicks from the navigation, and hopefully simplifies the user journey for our visitors.
• Do the same with our blogs, so they all too live in one location. Right now, we have a mix of approaches in how blogs are organized, so we want to standardize this where we can.
• Updating the choices of forums and blogs so that their naming conventions align more closely with Arm Developer. In attempting to bring the user experience for both sites closer together, we are updating the names of the forums and blogs in the community. There will be no changes to how they operate, but our plan is to label them more meaningfully.

I will post an update when we are ready to move forward, but you should not expect any disruption in your use of the community.

So, these are the immediate things we are doing to improve the Arm community for everyone that uses it. What I do want to encourage, is for you to continue to tell us what we can do better. You can leave a comment on this blog, post in Community Help, or click the yellow feedback tab on the right side of your browser.

Thanks for taking the time to read this blog, and I will post again when there are updates on the previous projects.