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Alter.Nation
Community news, customer stories, and more!
At Alteryx, we visualize, develop, and deliver community with the same passion and dedication that drives all of our products and services. Our community is not a sidecar. It is one of the engines in our stable of finely-tuned supercars.
Our intention is to build the best enterprise community on the internet. That may sound ridiculously lofty, and it is, but we look at the example that you, our customers, have set with the work you do everyday with our products and are inspired to reach for the stars. It is why we come to work every day.
Only 15 months ago we launched a reimagined Alteryx Community v2.0. We now find ourselves embarking on another ambitious release that has been in the works for a long time (code named "n3xt" internally). We've packed this release with all kinds of awesome. Check it out:
Fresh and Familiar
We loved the look and feel of the v2.0 release, but a year of real world use and feedback from our users exposed three main areas for improvement:
- Site Context and Controls - About 65% of our traffic originates from organic search (you may have heard of this newfangled search engine called Google), which means that a large number of our users are discovering the community for the first time and are landing in the middle of lengthy content pages. In the v2.0 design, that means that the user may be lacking context of what site they've landed on since the site header and user controls are out of view.
- Search - Search is the primary method of discovery and navigation, but it is commonly out of view and the only way to access it is a lengthy scroll to the top of the page.
- Navigation - One of the things we hear often from users is that they aren't always aware of all of the great things the community has to offer. In part, that means we need to enhance navigation and discoverability.
In the v3.0 release, we're making these oft-used elements visible and persistent at all times. As we began exploring ways to expose them on the page in a persistent way without overly-dominating the available real estate, it occurred to us that familiarity and muscle memory would be powerful tools in optimizing the user experience. Looking to Alteryx Designer, we saw the toolbar across the top and the configuration window on the left and had an "ah ha!" moment.
We've built the new navigation, search, and user controls to be convenient, fast, and fluid. It's the same great paradigm you're accustomed to as an Alteryx user, now on Alteryx Community.
Responsive
The truth is that a fully-responsive community is something we've been working on since day one. In a world with a vast array of screen resolutions and windowing schemes, a community that elegantly adapts is a must. During the initial development phase in the Summer last year, we realized it wasn't ready for prime time and set it aside until we could develop it in a manner that satisfies our stringent standards for quality and user experience. Our guiding principle has always been that we'll only push live features and updates that we would want to use. Now we're here and we couldn't be more proud to share it with you.
Inside baseball aside, the net for you is that the community should "just work" on any device. It's resolutionary.
Rich
One of the best ways to share knowledge around Alteryx is in the form of screenshots, .GIFs, and videos. Today we're rolling out new rich media features to enable faster sharing and better discoverability.
Challenging
Included in this release is the first of a few training sections to come: the Weekly Challenge. These challenges, previously located in the Knowledge Base, have been a huge hit and we received feedback that you'd like to see it expanded to help you synthesize your product knowledge. In the Knowledge Base, the exercise was typically presented, then a solution. What was missing was allowing the community to truly share and collaborate around single use cases. In the new Training area, the content has been enabled in a way that users can upload solutions, download others' solutions to compare, and have informal conversations about business problems. Coming soon, community members that participate (see: upload your solution) in challenges will be rewarded with some sweet badges.
Over the course of the year, we look forward to releasing more training channels that cater to a larger audience.
Secure
We want your Alteryx Community experience to be as secure as possible. In the past we had employed SSL encryption on select pages. Today we're moving to full-site SSL so that you can browse and engage with peace of mind.
Integrated
Our vision for Alteryx Community has always included deep integrations with our products. Why build a vibrant community, but restrict its usage to a browser-only experience? What if we could bring it directly into the environment in which you live every day? We're taking our first steps toward that future with the new Global Search feature in v11.0 of Alteryx Designer (coming in 2017). You'll be able to search community content from inside the Designer along with tools and help content.
Our beta customers have provided a lot of great feedback about this feature. We can't wait to get it out to everyone in v11.0.
The Journey Continues
As with all software, there are bound to be bugs and wonky visual elements. Thanks for your patience while we work through known and yet unknown items. As always, we'd love to hear your feedback and ideas. Our commitment to continued development is strong and you can expect to see many more optimizations and innovations ahead.
Thanks for your business and participation in this amazing community!
