You spend your day in the admin area. Your members never see it. They sign in to a different space with its own navigation, and knowing that space is how you avoid shipping something confusing.
Where they arrive
After signing in, a member lands on the dashboard. You assemble that page yourself from rows and elements, showing what you want people to do first.
A group can start somewhere else. In the group's settings, turn on Override the default dashboard and pick a hub. Everyone in that group then sees that hub instead of the dashboard. If that hub is deleted, the group falls back to the dashboard.
Their navigation
Members get their own menu, separate from yours. A new platform starts with Dashboard, followed by an entry for each building block you switched on:
- Community, if it is on
- Courses and Bookmarks, if courses are on
- Hubs, if hubs are on
- Events, if events are on
Profile and notifications are not menu entries. Members open their profile from the account menu and their notifications from the bell icon.
You manage this menu under Settings, then Navigation. Switching a feature on adds its entry to the end of this menu and offers to open Navigation, so you can rename or move it. The entry then stays put: a member with no course still sees Courses in the menu. The filtering happens one level down, inside the entry. Someone who bought one course opens Courses and finds a list with one course in it, not an empty area for everything they could have bought.
You can reorder this menu and rename its entries. Menu entries for your partner program only show to your partners and to admins.
It looks like you
The member area uses the logo, colours and font from your design settings. Once you connect your own domain, it appears in the address bar. There is no memberarea branding on the pages your customers use.
Look at it as a member
The fastest way to check your setup is to stop guessing and go and look.
To preview from your own account, use Switch area in the admin navigation to open the Member area. You see it as yourself, with whatever access your account carries.
To see what one specific member sees, open them from your audience list and press Login as member, in the list or on their profile. Now you see exactly what that person sees: their courses, their groups, their empty states. A bar at the top shows whose account you are using, and Back as admin returns you to the admin area.
The button appears only for roles that may sign in as members, and never on your own profile. You can only sign in as people whose role ranks below yours.
Signing in as a member is recorded in the audit log. It is a support tool, so use it to solve a problem and leave the session when you are done.
Do this after every big change. What looks obvious with an admin's knowledge of the structure is often a dead end for someone seeing it the first time.
On a phone
Most members read on a phone, and the member area is built for it.
Check your hubs and lessons at phone width before you launch. Wide tables and large images are the usual things that need attention.
The empty state problem
A new member arriving at an empty space assumes the platform is broken. Before you invite anybody, sign in as a test member and ask whether there is something to read, watch or click on the first screen.
One course, one post and one clear next step is enough.