Alteryx Community Ideas

Hi all,

Reading through the product ideas raised by the community - it strikes me that there are significant clusters.   Two jump out - improvements to date/time handling & parsing, and caching.

This is not a suggestion about either of these topics, but a question about how we look at and structure these ideas.   Let's take the date-time ones (full list is below) as a worked example:

- there are 23 distinct ideas (or 22 if you exclude the one about generating random dates) which relate to the treatment (mainly parsing; formatting or constructing) of dates & times

- None of these individually has enough votes to get them onto the "hot ideas" list - however when you look in aggregate across them, the theme of "standardizing and enriching date-time processing" is probably one of the hottest topics at the moment.

Two suggestions:

Tagging: If we are able to spot these patterns - and then create a tag that is related to this (in this case "DateTime handling") - the product team would probably be able to do some pretty interesting analytics.

Grouping: In order to allow people to spot these BEFORE they log the next idea which is trying to achieve the same thing - is it worth the community creating a grouped-up idea which then becomes persistent if there is a clear trend; and we can link out to these ideas?   For example an idea saying "standardize & Enrich treatment of date time", which then becomes a sticky item at the top of the forum so that folks don't have to search for pages to see if their idea is a duplicate.

NOTE: this second one (grouping) will also save time for the product team because they won't have to spend as much time flagging duplicates...

Hope this makes sense - as always, happy to help in thinking about potential solutions.

Note: the 23 ideas related to date-time treatment are captured below (as a worked example), and the authors of these ideas have been tagged out of courtesy

@DultonM @braxtone @Philip @AshokBhatt @CSchrader @dawid_nawrot @jdunkerley79 @Joe_Lipski @ChadB @nicholas_carstens @GGuenther @AndrewW @RachelW

Hi @LeahK

To really power the cleanup - what would be tremendously helpful is data on unsolved problems.

I think that this could take 2 forms:

a) a table format (like @JoeM does for the weekly exercises) - this would be fairly trivial to auto-generate this from the underlying data rather than hand-crafting - and can include links directly to the unsolved item

b) a grouped data structure, where we could see a few things:

      - Unsolved items by requestor (that allows us to group and target the biggest populations first)

      - some indicator of whether this requestor is still active in logging into the community (no point in chasing someone that hasn't logged in since 2013)

      - Links directly to the thread item

      - Last post date on the thread (no point in chasing someone to mark this as solved if it just happened 2 days ago)

That would enable us to go through the full population and more effectively work on getting the remaining items marked as solved or closed - and it would also allow us to track our progress as a metric of success day-by-day!

:-) I feel a data-driven-cleanup-project coming on - with as-of snapshots; trend graphs etc.   Very exciting stuff!

Hi @LeahK,

On our profile pic (top right) there is a very simple marker that shows if you have new messages or notifications.

Can we implement something similar for the other areas on the left hand panel?

- if there are new items in the discussions, then put a green circle with a number in indicating the count

- Same for Knowledge

- same for training; blogs; events etc.

This would be MASSIVELY helpful because that would allow everyone to see on a simple scan if there's new content out there without having to trawl into each section one by one to find new stuff.

NOTE: if we wanted to really make this uber-cool, for the discussion areas, users would be able to say "only count unsolved (or only new unsolved) discussion treads in my notification counter".   That way, people like the top solution hounds (listed below) could be in and solving problems in seconds.

Top solution authors copied: (based on https://community.alteryx.com/t5/solutions/acceptedsolutionsleaderboardpage/node-display-id/board%3A...)

@MarqueeCrew @jdunkerley79  @JohnJPS @michael_treadwell @patrick_digan @pcatterson @Joe_Mako @DataBlender @s_pichaipillai @Federica_FF @chris_love @tom_montpool @jack_morgan @kane_glendenning @Bob_Blackey @alex @danielbrun2 @DultonM @dataMack @Kanderson

Hey @LeahK

you mentioned in your post here (https://community.alteryx.com/t5/Alteryx-Community-News/Alteryx-Community-Top-Contributors-March-201...) just how important it is to mark things as "solution" once they are solved so that people know a good solution to the problem (similar to StackOverflow)

However, I've been trawling through the discussion boards, and there's loads of old stuff out there that has not been marked.

I think that there's two relatively simple things we can do on this:

- Give people quickfilters (like you do on the ideas discussion board to see what's on the roadmap etc) to target problems that are unsolved.  This will allow the solution hounds in the community (see the top 10 list below) the ability to quickly target any spare time to focus on providing solutions.    Note - I'm pretty certain that there is a huge community of people providing solutions, but they are not getting the credit 'cause folks are not marking their original request as "solved"

- Additionally - we need the ability to clean up - I was trawling through the older ones, and there's items out there from 2012 where I'm pretty sure that the requestor is no-longer checking for updates on this thread.   We can do 2 things here:

     - the community can request that people mark these as solved if they are solved (the solution hounds can chase this)

     - we also need the ability to mark a solution if the original poster does not - almost like a community vote like Stack Overflow does - again, this will allow the solution hounds and to assist with cleaning up the backlog, and will also make the data in this community more valuable.   

     - Finally - some things cannot be solved - we need to mark these as "closed but not solved" in some way.    For example - I could easily post something saying "please let me know how to get Alteryx to automatically change variables through the workflow when I change them".    This is on the idea board (and on the roadmap I believe), but not currently solved.   Can we have a way of either marking these as "Closed" or "Closed as new product idea - moved to idea board" and then create an idea-board insert for this?

I think that this would really help in cleaning up the backlog of items on the discussion forum which are years old and still looking like pending discussions!

Thank you 

Sean

Top 10 solution hounds (people with accepted solutions) across the 4 discussion areas as of 09 Apr 2017

( @MarqueeCrew @alex @patrick_digan @Bob_Blackey @pcatterson @Garrett @Kanderson @jlefeaux @JohnJPS @ThizViz @Claje @Abiswal86 @munirsalim @mbarone @msbs48 @AmandaMS @patrick_mcauliffe @ShannonH @rpaugh @bsharbo @tlisti @jdunkerley79 @Evie @DavidVonka @dev_raut @brendafos @toddhowl @oliver_huber just to take the top 10 from the various boards)

This is probably just the neat-freak inside of me but I've been noticing more an more Community posts that don't really belong where they are. Examples:

1. Someone poses a question in the wrong Discussion category.
2. Someone poses a Knowledge Base or Live Training style article as a Discussion.
3. Someone poses a question in the Ideas area.
4. Someone poses an idea for something that can already be done with Alteryx (something that should be moved to a Discussion)
5. Someone poses a discussion only to find out that there is no solution (something that should be moved to Ideas)

To help the moderators out, I think adding a "Suggest Move" option to the Options Menu on a post (pictured below) would be valuable.

When selecting this option a little window could pop up with a list of the different areas of the Community. The user would then select the one that they feel the post should be moved too. Moderators would then see all the suggested moves on a special screen and perform the move if they agree. Ideally, any hyperlinks to the moved post that exist within other posts on the community would be redirected.

The positive benefits of this would be:

• Making it easier to find content
• Refining the scope of Ideas Alteryx needs to consider
• Reducing the number of unanswered posts for people seeking to help solve others' discussions (there's a lot of Live Training posts that appear in the Unanswered Posts queue)

I think it would be great if there was a knowledge base section(or something similar) for any user to post random workflows that they find useful and want to share/solicit feedback from the community. Several posts from the last few weeks would fit well in this new category and sparked the idea: https://community.alteryx.com/t5/Setup-Configuration/Polling-a-directory-for-changed-files/m-p/51019 by @N___ or https://community.alteryx.com/t5/Publishing-Gallery/An-API-Client-for-Alteryx-Gallery-in-R/m-p/49464... by @michael_treadwell. Instead of having these great workflows buried/mixed in with all the questions, it would great if there was a single spot for people to post various workflows back to the community and get comments/feedback/enhancements from fellow community members. I think many more people would be open to sharing and commenting on posts like this if they had a spot to post them that is separate from all the Q&A style spots.

It would be very convenient if there was a button on posts (for the post author only) that would allow the author to auto re-post the question as a suggestion/feature request if it has gone unanswered for (2? 3?) days.

Probably not just a single click and done, but at least take the content and open a draft in the feature suggestion section.

Hi @JulieH (et al),

What's the social conversation going on right now about #alteryx (or other followed hashtags)?  We can see who's logged into the community, but what about a feed of the greater social universe?  Could we integrate a twitter feed into the community?

Along with that, maybe users would want to have instant messaging to the public (contained within the community) as a lighter form of posts.

Just a few related ideas.

Cheers,

Mark

TWIMC, 

Our team loves the weekly exercises and value the lessons learned-- or should I say earned--  from them each week. However, finding them is a little, well, weird especially when I am trying to explain how to find them to colleagues: "Well, so, you go to search, type weekly and then select results from the last week and then each of the previous weeks exercises will be held in that most recent workbook. " What I would love to see is these in their own space within the community so one would not have to search for them each week. Bonus points if we were able to DL all workbooks as a single zip that we could have for new-hire training material! 

Cheers, 

John

Other online communities I particiate in (mainly for home automation or iOS programming) use a signature tag or header with your current hardware and/or software specs.  It makes getting questions asked and answered much easier when you know what the limitations are or that someone is working with an unusual setup.

For the Alteryx community that would probably be at least putting the user's current version number in their posting signature.

We would have to make sure that the post is preserved with the version number that was in use at the time of posting.

This would probably help users who are on an older version know that they may not be able to use an answer that they find until they upgrade.  And likewise it would help a user know when they are looking at outdated information.

Hardware specs would be nice to know too; although for most of what Alteryx does it is irrelevant (in my experience).

I'd love to see an option for  "With ALL of the words" in Advanced Search as well as "With one or more of the words".

It would be great if there were a way to see the all the product ideas I've starred. Right now, if I want to review those ideas I'm going to need to scroll through all of them looking for gold stars. Perhaps some kind of activity log in the user profile could provide us with this information?

It may be nice to be able have quicker access to social media for shareing questions, solutions, challenges...

On facebook, twitter with shortcut links to community, instagram with workflow and tool pictures etc...

By the way;

Have you voted in the @kdnuggets Analytics poll? Support @alteryx only tool both in gartner's BI and Analytics MQ http://ow.ly/OgQk300eTvE 

Best

I'd like to have the "Mark All as Read" option in the Knowledge Base like it is in other sections. Not that I could ever read them all, but this is my system for identifying new posts.

Visualize Alteryx Ideas

The IDEAS landing page should have a visually appealing dashboard.

Visualization should track each idea over time, it should be filterable with a keyword search based on a Period, an Idea's Title or Tagged Label.

Appealing color code should be able to distinguish individual Idea's Star Rating.

Viz contents/layout can be inspired from the inputs of community users.

Top Ideas should be released as new product features.

,

When me or my clients try to compare alteryx to other vendors,

we all end up seeing graphs like the one below. These are showing how very few tags alteryx has on stackoverflow...

Clients often consider how it's easy to find answers to common analytics or software related questions. Alteryx seems to have a lag in there.

I wish, me and all of Alteryx community friends could be able to link their Alteryx accounts to the stackoverflow accounts and once we write down a question it's going to be automatically posted on stackoverflow and when an answer is received it'll update us as well...

I sincerely believe that this will greately increse the word of mouth effect on Alteryx products.

http://blog.dominodatalab.com/open-source-winning-against-proprietary-data-science-vendors/

I was speaking to a new customer this week and they really like the Community but they wondered if it would be possible to include an area in the Discussion Section for topics that are more centric to areas of interest and industry specific questions.  The example I was given was around survey data.

The customer mentioned that the Tableau Forum has something similar and that they felt this was missing from ours.

I'm not aware that this area already exists in the Community but it seems a good idea to me as all the sections at the moment are very product centric.

Thanks

Looking through the Top Ideas I was struck by how many are already in the product and marked as "Now Available" - this is fantastic but it does make navigating this view difficult. Could we remove them and move them into a "Now Available" view so we can see what great work the Product Team and Devs are doing at listening to the community?

Chris

I was posting a question today about sorting, but didn't see a label for sort, sorting, or a question label. Not sure what the qualifications are for making the label list, but I suggest that "Question" and "Sort" be added.