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. Assign a hub to a group in the group's settings, and everyone in that group sees that hub instead of the dashboard.
Their navigation
Members get their own menu, separate from yours. A typical one looks like this:
- Home, whatever you set as the start
- Courses, if courses are switched on
- Community, if it is on
- Events, with their calendar
- Profile and notifications, always
You build this menu yourself under Settings, then Navigation. Switching a feature on or off adds or removes its entry there, and 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.
It looks like you
The member area uses the logo, colours and font from your design settings, and your own domain 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.
Preview from your own account. Switch to the member area from the admin navigation. You see it as yourself, with whatever access your account carries.
Sign in as a specific member. Open a member from your audience list and use the option to sign in as them. Now you see exactly what that person sees: their courses, their groups, their empty states.
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. The member area is built for it, and a native app for iOS and Android is in preparation.
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.