Forum team update: Shortform is now called “Quick takes”, has a section on the Frontpage, and changed in some other smaller ways.
Here’s what’s new:
Shortform is now called “Quick takes” (Shortform was confusing to many people)
There’s a section for Quick takes on the Frontpage to improve visibility (you can still post Quick takes that don’t show up on the Frontpage; just deselect the “Frontpage” tag). Those will only show up in the separate view
Some other design changes to make things clearer and easier to use:
There’s an input field in the section on the Frontpage, so you can add a Quick take there directly
Improvements to the page where all of an author’s Quick takes are shown
Other visual changes to the Quick takes and the creation flow
Rationale/context:
In some cases, Forum users want to share (and read) less polished ideas or other content that doesn’t seem like a full post on the Forum. Shortform was designed years back to fill this gap, but the Shortform feature was tucked away, hard to read, and had a name that most users didn’t understand.
Over the past few months, we’ve been exploring ways to encourage lower-barrier discussions, culminating in this latest version of Quick takes.
As always, we’d love feedback on these changes. You can comment on my Quick take (or email us if you prefer). We’ll also monitor how this feature gets used and improve it over time.
Some of these features were released last month but only announced now (post reactions and the author improvements). Some features we’re launching together to reduce the amount of times users feel surprised by things changing (right sidebar on the Frontpage, “Recent discussion” redesign, Best of page, etc.). There are pros and cons to both continuous releases and bundled releases, this time we did a bit of both.