Community Support Forum Redesign

Community is Santander's internal equivalent of Reddit or Quora, a place where colleagues can post edge-case questions and tap into the collective knowledge of the organisation. It lives within the i-Exchange knowledge base and has become a vital safety net: when the official process doesn't cover a situation, Community often does.

What started as a pilot had grown rapidly to over 1,000 posts a month with more business areas joining regularly. The Product Owner, Danielle, reached out after seeing the i-Exchange work and asked if I could address two growing pains: homepage load times that were getting worse as the platform scaled, and a feeling that the platform wasn't doing enough to recognise its most active contributors.

Building a team

I was still managing i-Exchange deployments in parallel, so I made a deliberate choice: rather than take this project on alone, I'd use it as an opportunity to lead. I reached out to three Community moderators (Samantha, Lee and Bonny) and assigned each a research strand matched to their strengths.

Across surveys, interviews, observational studies, and competitor analysis, the team produced a consistent picture of where Community was falling short. We came back together to share findings and consolidate them into themes.

Research findings

Once we had completed each research piece, we came back together and shared the key insights.

• Surveys

  Outdated content

  Samantha, Bonny and I surveyed all staff to understand their goals and pain points. A consistent theme emerged: posts from 2021 onwards had never been removed, older content was dominating search results and answers that were once correct were now actively misleading colleagues.

• Competitor analysis

  Missing questions

  Lee analysed support forums like Reddit and ServiceNow Community to benchmark our approach. The finding was striking: every competitor surfaced new and trending posts immediately on the homepage. Community did not show a single question on the homepage at all, directly contradicting Jakob's Law. Users arrive expecting familiar patterns and we were breaking them from the first screen.

• User interviews

  Missing recognition

  Samantha interviewed contact centre and live chat colleagues to understand how they used Community day to day. Despite points, badges and a leaderboard existing, top contributors felt invisible. Recognition was there in theory but buried in practice.

• Observational studies

  Hidden menus

  Bonny spent time in branch running usability testing and observational studies. She found that key actions like My network, My posts, Achievements and notifications were all hidden on a separate page called myExchange, completely disconnected from where colleagues expected to find them.

Heuristic analysis

No questions

This is a support forum, but there are no questions on the home page. Our competitor analysis revealed this major flaw.

Missing menus

Key menus like My network, My posts and Achievements were held on a separate page. Why weren't they shown on Community?

Forums galore

Each forum had a purpose, but we needed to find a better way to display them. A General category doesn't count as effective grouping.

Too much information

The information on each forum, recent discussions and live leaderboards were causing excessive load times.

Hidden leaderboard

One of our biggest drivers for engagement was users collecting their points, why do we only give them a tiny portion of the home page.

Missing references

Most Community posts relate to a process on i-Exchange, but the reference for the process was often missing.

Ignored displays

The Recently viewed articles on the right were supposed to prompt getting the i-Exchange reference, but these were often ignored.

Excessive explanation

The instructions were too long to read and the text was tiny. This copy needed to be simplified.

Poor signalling and discoverability

Users are able to add attachments, but it's not well signalled. There are often complaints that they can't do this, but really they just can't find it.

The old post problem

When checking if the question has been answered before, how do they know that a four year old answer is still correct? Community has been active since 2021 with no content expiry in place. Posts were growing rapidly with no mechanism to retire outdated answers. We needed to strike a balance between keeping posts relevant and not taking away the huge amount of knowledge held in previous answers.

The loading problem

It was obvious why we had a loading problem. The homepage displayed the forum name, number of questions, number of comments and last activity for 20 forums. Loading 4 years worth of information is not necessary. When speaking to users they did not find the information useful, however the product owner and moderators were keen on keeping it. The trade-off needed to be made explicit.

The recognition problem

Gamification was a big part of Community from launch, and it worked. Users loved competing for points and badges. But the colleagues putting in the most effort weren't seeing themselves reflected back. I had all the data I needed. The challenge was surfacing it without recreating the load time problem.

The missing menus problem

Community network, previous posts, profile, achievements and notifications were all held on myExchange, a separate section of the i-Exchange website. Two feedback forums existed, but the prompt told users to ask a question. This was the wrong framing for someone trying to report an issue or leave a suggestion. We needed to review the key journeys, organise content correctly and make sure our forms were clear.

I scheduled design workshops with Samantha, Lee and Bonny to work through solutions for each problem we'd identified.

Posts needed to expire, but what if we lost helpful information?

A logical solution to outdated content is for it to expire. We had to decide between reviewing 50,000 Community posts manually or setting all posts over a year old to expire automatically.

Automatic expiry was the best option, but we needed a contingency. We agreed a control for expired posts, allowing moderators to reactivate them if required.

Push back on expiring posts

The post expiry request needed to go through a global ideation forum. Santander UK were the only group using Community, but we needed votes from the other countries. Why would they vote for something that doesn't benefit them?

We gave ourselves the best chance by building a strong business case to share with the UK Platform Lead, but we weren't optimistic. We got to work on a plan B, opting for a bulk update to expired posts each month. One way or another we were going to clean up Community!

The home page data had to go

The table of data on the home page wasn't helping our frontline colleagues and it was the right call to remove it. The product owner and moderators weren't sure, but once I'd made the case for improving load times they agreed the trade-off was worth it.

More data problems with the new leaderboards

The same problem appeared when looking at leaderboard data. Looking up total points for every user on every page load would have recreated the exact problem we'd just solved. The compromise was an hourly refresh, removing the need to recalculate on every visit.

Moving menus

The existing tabs on myExchange were simply lifted onto Community home, redesigned and stripped back to the most useful options. Favourites stayed on myExchange, Events were removed, and iconography was added to make each option easier to distinguish at a glance.

Redesigned forms

We ran a workshop to ideate solutions for the forms, prioritising ideas that required less developer effort given our limited resource. Clearer prompts, a visible attachments section and an i-Exchange article lookup made the journeys significantly easier to follow.

With the forum data removed, there was plenty of real estate available on the home page. I thought it was odd that a forum didn't have any posts immediately available, so I created a new pinned posts section for moderators to promote certain posts.

A leaderboard worth seeing

The new leaderboard section was eye catching and made our users feel like their efforts on Community were finally being recognised. Using data I already had available meant no additional development time.

New home for the missing menus

The new tabs were placed exactly where they belong, giving users everything they needed on Community without sending them to myExchange.

Simplified forms

By amending the copy and adding some visual indicators, we were able to signal the purpose of each forum. Feedback forums had a Give feedback prompt, while support forums were headed Ask a question. This was just one part of the form redesign. Scroll down to see the whole form UI!

• Loading times

  By setting up a reduced version of the existing home page in the test environment, I was able to check how much load times improved when the forum data was removed. Across my team, load times now averaged 2-3 seconds. I knew from experience that test environment load times don't always reflect production, and this didn't factor in the new content I was adding to the home page. That said, it was a good indicator we were going in the right direction!

• Old posts impact

  I ran a test where I removed the majority of older posts and checked five common search queries. The results were far more relevant with all the old junk removed!

• New forms

  A focus group reviewing the new forms found users were much happier with the layout. The ability to select an article reference was particularly welcomed. These were deliberate low-cost changes, so it was good to see them land well.

• Recognition

  We spoke to some of our top contributors and a few users who had been active previously but dropped off. We wanted to know if the new leaderboard display would be enough to bring them back. Generally people were more inclined to compete, and the breakdown at forum level meant users could compete locally within their own teams. I hadn't appreciated how much people were bought into winning a leaderboard spot on Community!

Redesigned homepage

We found the menus

Missing menus had a new home. Now Community members had everything they need in one place.

New hero section

A brighter hero section welcomes the user and immediately offers the key journeys of posting and searching.

Pinned posts

Making some posts front and centre meant getting more eyes on the biggest posts.

New forum display

We threw out the big list and replaced it with clearly organised forums. We used card sorting with users to define these.

Top contributors

I expanded the leaderboard section, including the ability to see the highest scoring users on each forum.

Redesigned post submission form

New intro

The new intro section gave the correct context and could be switched to give feedback depending on the forum.

Related articles

A simple lookup menu allowed users to reference processes from i-Exchange.

Clear instructions

Instructions for writing a post were reduced and bulleted. This made it easier for users to do what they came here to do.

Signalled attachments

Providing a new section for attachments meant that users could easily share files when they needed to.

Removing the live forum data table cut homepage load times from up to 10 seconds to around 3 seconds, a 50% reduction that translated directly to 97 hours saved across the operation every month. The redesigned homepage and post form brought Community visually in line with Santander's internal design system for the first time.

The expanded leaderboard and medal system were well received by the community. Colleagues who had previously been active but drifted re-engaged when they saw their contributions being properly recognised. The per-forum competition mechanic (which emerged from testing rather than the original brief) became one of the most talked-about additions.

Post expiry via the global ideation forum didn't pass, as anticipated. The bulk expiry workaround (run monthly by the moderation team) delivered a similar improvement to content relevance without requiring the global vote.

I moved on from Santander shortly after this project completed. The load time saving is the hardest figure I have and the one I am most confident in.