We tried introducing a forum to our users in the hope of moving away from Discord for all the same reasons and ended up finally shutting the forum down to preserve the unity of having a community all in one place. Reason being, users don't seem to care about the limitations like we do and preferred Discord. The users spoke through their choice of where to post. It feels like the same reason teams use Slack for the perceived relatively friction-free ability to post, despite its equivalent issues for business communication.
It makes me think that users believe finding the answer is our problem, not theirs. Their job is just to ask the question and expect a response. Frustrating.
It's tempting to think a bot or some kind of "save this answer" feature in Discord itself would help, but bots often fail to create the great user experience we expect them to.
> It makes me think that users believe finding the answer is our problem, not theirs. Their job is just to ask the question and expect a response. Frustrating.
If you're selling a product, and you think that finding an answer is the user's problem, not yours, you will soon not be selling a product.
If, however, you're talking about an open-source project, then I think you're baselessly assuming that users "expect" an answer. Users will ask for answers in the most convenient way (asking on discord) in hopes of getting a quick answer. This does NOT mean that they will not fall back to googling if that avenue fails.
You're totally right and of course we help away. Reducing the steps to be able to ask a question is also a better user experience, hence ditching the forum. Give users what they want, including timely responses.
But the question still remains of how to maximize a user's ability to find answers on their own, for those who wish to do so. There are always gaps in documentation and I find a forum's ability to seek out past answers to similar questions way better than Discord's search, but it wasn't worth the friction.
I think the ideal solution is a combo of continually improving documentation as common questions emerge and a "saved replies" feature. Users still get a human response, which feels good, but they have to wait less time for some replies. And questions that start reappearing drive the development of new tutorials, etc.
Just found the Discord feature suggestion page for saved replies and voted :)
It makes me think that users believe finding the answer is our problem, not theirs. Their job is just to ask the question and expect a response. Frustrating.
It's tempting to think a bot or some kind of "save this answer" feature in Discord itself would help, but bots often fail to create the great user experience we expect them to.