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Idea Exchange Usability Issues


LiliMcDonald wrote:
@tst wrote:

Somewhat related sidepoint - instead of leaving the main page open, I often keep the LV idea exchange unread module open and go to the main page from there, partly because of this issue, but mostly because the it's a pain to follow new comments on the IE (and other similar boards like the news board) and it's easier to keep that page open. Can you ask Lithium about providing a standard board view for the IE (i.e. show list of threads sorted by activity, show thread with new comments as bold), at least as an option?


Can you provide me the link of the LabVIEW Idea Exchange unread module so I have a better understanding of your workflow?

On the Forums News section, there's a sidebar component which lists the latest comments on the posts. If a similar component exisited for the Idea Exchange, would that be helpful?

I do understand what you're asking for and it makes sense for a technical community such as this. Just trying to get an idea for a potential workaround.


OK, a bit of a tangent, but here's how it works: I have a bunch of floated boards. I go into the main page occasionally and see which of those have new content, because they're bold. I go into boards, access the content I want and mark the whole board as read so I can see again when there's new content. That works fine, as the threads are sorted by most recent content.

 

With the IE, this doesn't work, because there I get this rather than the standard board view:

 

IE.png

 

 

That's not helpful for tracking new content, because it shows whatever it wants to show ("hot ideas", whatever that means), where I actually want to see the most recent content, which includes ideas and comments. I do have an unread topics widget (shown on the right), which is what I use, but that has a bunch of usability issues:

 

  1. This list doesn't show all threads with new content.
  2. If you click a link in this list, you're taken to the thread, not to the oldest unread post.

 

If you click the View All link you get this, which is what I actually work with today:

 

IE-unread.png

 

This does allow you to get to the new content, but has its own bunch of usability issues:

 

  1. You have to get to it, which means going to the IE, scrolling down and finding that link (or saving it as a favorite, which could be an issue if you have multiple IEs). Tedious. That's why I generally just stay on this page and refresh it when there's new content.
  2. Clicking the thread title still takes you to the thread and not to the new content (in the standard forums view you can configure clicking the text to take you to the new content). To get to the new content, you have to click the number under the "New" column, which is a much smaller target.
  3. When you click it, if the idea itself is unread and has comments, clicking the number will take you to the first comment rather than to the idea. You have to pay attention to make sure you're not missing out on an idea you haven't actually read.
  4. The number is not only small, but also far from a lot of the useful content (the icon and title).
  5. The number of items per page is fixed and fairly small.
  6. If you mark an old comment or idea as unread, it won't actually appear in this list (at least it didn't use to. I don't know what the threshold is and I haven't checked if this still happens). Not critical, but just thought I would mention it while I'm here.

All of those could be solved by allowing us to have a standard board display for the IE (with or without kudos for comments, I don't care much either way), which I expect would be much more useful for the regulars.

 

And a couple of other issues, while I'm on the topic of the IE:

 

  1. It doesn't respect your setting of "posts per page". Regardless of how many you set, it shows 10 comments per page.
  2. There used to be a place which showed the number of pages in a thread and that calculated the number based on that setting, so that number would be wrong. I think it was in the unread widget, but I don't see it now, so I guess that feature was removed.
  3. If you click the "(X new)" link for each idea in the main IE page (for example, the second idea in my first image has two new comments), it will take you to the new content, but that doesn't seem to work if the new content is not in the first page of comments (or at least didn't the last time I tried it). Maybe this is also related to the "posts per page" setting?

 

As for how the news section behaves, I have had very limited experience with it, but my impression was that it doesn't work at all. For instance, I seem to remember seeing the board marked as having new content a week or two ago, going in, not managing to find it and then marking the board as read so that it wouldn't bug me.


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I hope you don't mind, I moved your post into its own topic out of Main forums page. This is good feeback to have and I'd love to hear from others as well. It definitely helps to not only hear what doesn't work, but suggestions for improving.

 

There are some design issues here that could potentially be addressed by our team, but also some that are just Lithium platform UI issues -- which I can raise requests on.

 

I use the Lithium Community Idea Exchange a lot and feel the pain on finding new comments. I typically use their "view new posts" page to see what has happened since I last visited.

I was wondering if you have the same comments about the Unread Discussions > Posts view for the NI Idea Exchange?

 

Also, as for the Forums News section, is this the new posts number you are referring to?

 

newpostsblog.png

 

If so, this number is not just new articles, but new comments. You can see the latest comments in the sidebar:

 

comments.png

 

Or you'll see at the bottom left of the article teaser the number of comments (and number of new comments):

 

newcommenthighlight.png

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@LiliMcDonald wrote:

I hope you don't mind, I moved your post into its own topic out of Main forums page. This is good feeback to have and I'd love to hear from others as well. It definitely helps to not only hear what doesn't work, but suggestions for improving.


The new topic is fine. The only suggestion I can think of is the one I made - have a standard board view for the IE. It's a practical tool for displaying this type of content, Lithium already has the code for it and we're already used to it. Seems like an obvious answer. Of course, that would depend on Lithium to do it, so I'm adjusting my expectations accordingly (I did also suggest this six years ago, when the IE started, but didn't seem to get any traction).

 

 


@LiliMcDonald wrote:

I was wondering if you have the same comments about the Unread Discussions > Posts view for the NI Idea Exchange?


I don't remember ever seeing that before (looking now I see that there's a tab on the top of the unread page for switching to this view). A quick look at it shows that it won't be usable either:

 

  1. In full text mode it's way too verbose.
  2. It's sorted backward in time, which makes it unusable for following a thread (where you want to read the earlier comments first).
  3. It's not practical for threads which have multiple comments, where you want to read the comments for a single thread together, so that you don't lose context.

 

 


LiliMcDonald wrote:

Also, as for the Forums News section, is this the new posts number you are referring to?

 

newpostsblog.png

 

If so, this number is not just new articles, but new comments. You can see the latest comments in the sidebar:

 

comments.png

 

Or you'll see at the bottom left of the article teaser the number of comments (and number of new comments):

 

newcommenthighlight.png


Your first image is what I use for "oh, there's new content". The last image isn't useful because I'm not sure on what the sort order of the posts are. Presumably it's reverse order of posts, and only now I see that there was actually new content in the past week - you posted a new post, but I didn't see it because I was focused on the latest comments section, which doesn't show it.

 

Like I said, for regular users, this would also work better as a board display.


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Ditto to everything tst said.

 

My workflow also going directly to the Unread Topics section and hitting View All.  I then Ctrl-click every number in the New column to get them in new tabs.  If there's more than one page of unread topics, be sure to hit the Refresh button on your browser, rather than the Next button in the page, because you will skip a whole page worth of unread topics, or go to an empty page depending on how many topics there are.  I believe there's a thread somewhere regarding this bug, but I'm struggling to dig it up.

 

--
Tim Elsey
Certified LabVIEW Architect
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My workflow is essentially the same as Tim's, except I don't always open all the links at once and if an idea has more than one new comment, I need to look to see if it's an idea I already read. I don't consider needing to refresh a bug, because it does make sense - since this only shows unread content, once you read it it's no longer there. It can, however, be confusing and it certainly doesn't match the behavior of other boards, where you look at all the content.


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tst wrote: I don't remember ever seeing that before (looking now I see that there's a tab on the top of the unread page for switching to this view). A quick look at it shows that it won't be usable either:
  1. In full text mode it's way too verbose.
  2. It's sorted backward in time, which makes it unusable for following a thread (where you want to read the earlier comments first).
  3. It's not practical for threads which have multiple comments, where you want to read the comments for a single thread together, so that you don't lose context.

2 could be addressed if they offered sort options, and for 3 I just change my workflow to open the Idea in a new tab to read everything together. But, I can see how it would be much friendly if new comments were grouped together. They could even have a collapse button if they did not want to take up room on the page.

 


tst wrote:  Your first image is what I use for "oh, there's new content". The last image isn't useful because I'm not sure on what the sort order of the posts are. Presumably it's reverse order of posts, and only now I see that there was actually new content in the past week - you posted a new post, but I didn't see it because I was focused on the latest comments section, which doesn't show it. Like I said, for regular users, this would also work better as a board display.

For Forum News, the posts are by newest to oldest, no sorting available, and comments not taken into account in regards to the newest status. I would be hesitant to transform this area into a board view, as we'd no longer have the correct order and users couldn't glance at the article teasers to get a general idea as to what the announcement is.
It seems like just having a way to see the latest activity in this section would help though. There's this page, but I know there would be the same complaints as the unread page for the Idea Exchange.

 

Another side note:

Have you seen the All Recent Topics page or the All Recent Posts page? I imagine the same comments would be given for this. It'd be nice if it were possible to narrow down to only boards you care about too.

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@LiliMcDonald wrote:
But, I can see how it would be much friendly if new comments were grouped together.

Which is exactly what the discussions view does. I should make it clear - I'm perfectly happy with the functionality of the dicussions view. It does what I want. My issues with it are usability issues, not conceptual ones. If they were fixed, I would be happy.

 

Of course, the functionality of the board view is slightly different, with the primary difference being that read discussions don't disappear from the board view, so I would still prefer that to fixing the unread module.

 

 

 


@LiliMcDonald wrote:

It seems like just having a way to see the latest activity in this section would help though. There's this page, but I know there would be the same complaints as the unread page for the Idea Exchange.


Actually, I think that page is fine (although I might prefer its discussions counterpart). It probably has the same usability issues as the IE page, but the difference is in volume - the IE has a lot more content. This is a good example of something that works and may be a minor annoyance with lower volumes, but doesn't scale well to high volumes of content.

 

I think the main problem with this page is that it appears to be hidden - I don't see a link to it anywhere in the news blog. If it would be there, I would just use it the same way I use the IE.

 

 

 


LiliMcDonald wrote:

 

Another side note:

Have you seen the All Recent Topics page or the All Recent Posts page? I imagine the same comments would be given for this. It'd be nice if it were possible to narrow down to only boards you care about too.


I haven't seen them, but they don't seem to provide the answer. Even if they could be filtered by board, they seem to have their own usablity issue for this, primarily that they show a preview (which hurts scanning and iteration) and that there doesn't seem to be any easy way to mark things as read.


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Bump on this too to see if there's any action taken.


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I provided new use cases to Lithium and asked for update, but no news as of yet. I said this in your other topic, but wanted to reiterate it here for anyone following this particular topic: I think it's important to keep in mind that when Lithium is considering enhancements or new features, they have to take into account if this would impact/benefit other customers, does it fit into their roadmap, how many other customers requesting the feature, etc.

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