forum.telia.se - One of Sweden's major telecommunications companies wanted to improve their customer service by adding a forum to their website.
Based on an existing product I designed the start page to help users find their way and show all the activity that happened within the various threads.
There was no budget to do any real user research but I did inquire of friends and family, with different levels of experience of online forums, how they assess a site. It seemed that most of them tried to get a feel for how quickly one might get a response and the faster they thought they might get one, the likelier they were to write a question. The start page was therefore designed to show new posts as soon as they were posted and to show statistics to help visitors judge the level of activity and number of visitors.
We also show the most helpful users on the startpage to encourage users to help others as one of the goals of the project was to decrease calls to the call center.