Alteryx Community Ideas

Problem:  We are finding many discussion posts solutions that either are exactly the same as a previous solution on the same question or slightly different and in addition they are being marked as solutions. This doesn't help the community if there is no premium on either expanding significantly on the previous answer or answering completely differently but also correctly. Users are being rewarded on just posting an answer not on posting a thoughtful, useful, and correct answer.

Solution: Stack overflow as an example handles this quite nicely in that they offer many different responses but also with the ability to upvote OR downvote a response. This would radically improve the responses along with the metrics that guide many other programs in play on the community.

I think it would be great to have badge(s) for the interactive lessons. They are a really great tool for people to learn about the tool, so badges could recognize folks who've invested the time to complete it.

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!

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).

Let me start by saying that badges are awesome, and I love being able to see what I've earned and how that compares to others in the Community.

I think it would be fantastic to be able to search for users who have earned a given badge.  Today, you can really only find out if someone has a badge by actively searching for their profile and checking every badge they have.  This can be particularly challenging if I'm interested in seeing, for example, the user accounts of every Alteryx ACE in 2017, or who has earned the Genius badge.

This can also be really helpful if I'm looking for users with a certain level of certification.  I can see by poking around that a few users I know have achieved Alteryx Advanced Certification, but I'd really like to be able to see all 30 people who have the badge as of today.

Overall, I think this would be a really powerful feature that would help improve the Community experience.

Post authors can mark zero, one or many solutions as answers to a post.  I'd like to see more solution alternatives posted in Community.  There are always many ways to solve a given challenge.  While giving stars is an option available to all, perhaps once a certain "level" is achieved you can also mark replies as accepted solutions.

Thanks for your consideration,

Mark

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

Maybe I missed (if so, please tell me where is it), but a "Remember Me" or "Stay Connected" option would be great, so our sessions doesn't end (I keep this webpage opened almost all day).

Currently the only way that a thread can be closed on the discussion boards is if it's solved, however there are several cases where it cannot be solved because it's identified a defect, or something that would be an idea for the product.

In these cases, can we have an option to close this thread (so that folk can see it's done) even if it's not solved with a different closure indicator?

I can think of a few:

- Transfer to idea

- Transfer to defect/bug

- Abandoned

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)

if I post a useful article in the community I'd like the ability to mark it as such, rather than as a question. At the moment I get emails prompting me to accept a solution - when there isn't a solution required. Marking a topic as "information only" or similar would solve this.

I am meeting a lot of awesome people at #Inspire17!! ...but when I went to try and find some of them on the Community, I realize there is no easy way to do this. How cool would it be for there to be a User or People section on the Community where you could find people by querying their public stats (or even private stats if the user checks something saying to make those stats public)?! This feature could help tremendously with networking! Here's some situations where something like this would help:

"I remember this guy worked for x-company, if only I could see their name, I would know who it is"

"I want to connect with other Alteryx users near me"

"I want to reach out to this presenter from Inspire17, but I forgot what their Community Username was"

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

Sometimes, Ideas are posted by users that have solutions or workarounds that meet the user's need.  When others in the Community respond with these suggestions, the ideas usually end up in a status of "Not Planned".

I think it would be really helpful to be able to mark these as "solved".  An example of this is the following post:

https://community.alteryx.com/t5/Alteryx-Product-Ideas/Copy-and-Paste-Data-Directly-Into-Canvas/idc-...

Here, the user posted a suggestion, and I as well as @mcarrico were able to provide suggestions that met this need.  I think marking this post as Solved could help other users who have the same thought in the future.

I also think that this might be an opportunity for an additional tag for Community ideas, either "workaround available" or "already implemented".  "Not Planned" doesn't necessarily read as well as it could in cases where a solution exists.

We all loved the District section of the old Gallery, it was the single most important page of the old Gallery as it was allowing to quickly find high quality tools, no matter if built by Alteryx or Community.

In the current Gallery we are completely missing the categories for Alteryx built macros / connectors / tools, as well as we don't have a category for ACE-built tools. Right now, the Gallery is still in it's early days, but it's already hard to find the things that we are looking for. I often reference Gallery-Macros in the training and customer sessions. In the past I knew where to send the people (Districts Page), nowadays I don't. There is no single page that shows what is really important and quality proven. 

I like that we are able to tag what we upload, but there is no way to differentiate from quality builds and "others". I don't want to call people out here.

Take a look at the following page:

I'm sure that's amazing content and has its right to stay on the Gallery, but I'm pretty sure we aren't searching for this or shall we upload all our exercises and weekly challenges to the new Gallery?

We need:

- Alteryx Category

- ACE Category

- Quality Content flag

Theoretically there is the following (hidden) option - but it's only available on sub-pages.

And it's not really well maintained from what we can see. Let's take a look what's supported by Alteryx in the Automation Category:

And now let's take a look at the full page:

Alteryx has a technology alliance with Blueprism -  shouldn't we trust their content? The official Blue Prism Connector is not supported by Alteryx? And their macro as well. How shall I explain to my customers that these are "semi-official" (because not part of core-product) tools if they aren't even flagged as Alteryx-supported?

There are many more examples where even Macros from the AlteryxProducts account are not flagged as supported by Alteryx (e.g. Runner macro). 

There needs to be a single page that shows all high-quality builds, as well as we need a page for all Alteryx / ACE tools to make it easier for everyone.

Best

Alex

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

In today's day and age, we are constantly on the move and we may not always have access to the laptop/desktop that we have installed Alteryx on. While on the move and no access to the Alteryx installed computer, it would be great to login to the Alteryx Community Simulator to test or solve a problem or try a new field, formula, etc. to see how the results would look.

I like that we can now connect our linkedin and other accounts to our profile: https://community.alteryx.com/t5/Alteryx-Community-Ideas/Linkedin-in-the-profile/idi-p/564357. I would like to also connect my twitter account. 

Thanks!

Patrick

cc:@TreyW 

Congratulations!  You've ______________ 5 times this week.  Some new gamification ideas to reward continuous involvement in the community.

Cheers,

Mark