You build the community from the admin side. Your members experience something rather different, and it is worth knowing what that is before you make decisions about it.
The fastest way to see it is to sign in as one of them.
The feed
Where most members spend their time. Posts from the forums they can reach, with newest, relevant and top to sort by.
Members who can reach several areas get a feed per area, so a member in two programmes is not reading one merged stream.
Forums
The structure you built, as a list. Members open a forum, read it, post in it if its type allows.
Forums can be marked as read, which matters more in a busy community than it sounds: an unread marker that never clears gets ignored, and then everything gets ignored.
Members
A directory of who is in the community, searchable, with who is online right now and who your admins are.
There is a map as well, showing where members are. In an international community this is the single thing most likely to make people feel they are somewhere real.
Badges
The badge wall: all badges that exist, which the member has earned, and the top collectors.
Showing the unearned ones is the point. A member who can see that a badge exists at fifty posts has a target; one who only sees their own three badges has a souvenir.
Leaderboard
Ranking by points, with the member's own rank called out, plus the level distribution.
Only present if you switched the level system on, and worth thinking about before you do.
Profiles
Their own profile and everybody else's: posts, comments, followers, following, level and badges, and the profile fields you defined. Saved posts are on their own profile and private to them.
Member profiles and profile fields
Search
If you enabled it, members can search the community. It looks across posts and comments, and a hit inside a comment opens the post it belongs to with the comment highlighted.
That behaviour is what makes search worth having: the answer somebody needs is usually in the twelfth comment of a thread, not in a post title.
Preferences
Members control their own notifications and how often they get the digest email. Your setting is only the default they start with.
Streaks
If streaks are on, members see their own streak and where they stand. It is a private motivator, unlike the leaderboard, which suits communities where public ranking would be wrong.
Looking at it as a member does
Sign in as a member who is not you, ideally one who joined recently and is not in every group. A community looks complete from an admin account, which has access to everything, and much emptier from an account that does not.
That gap is where most community problems live.