Alteryx Community Ideas

I've posted here on the General sub: https://community.alteryx.com/t5/General-Discussions/Collect-Team-Alteryx-Data-for-Internal-KPIs/td-...

First off, I would like to thank @simonaubert_bd for his fantastic workflow. He has put together a workflow that scrapes through the Alteryx community profile to gather all the badges one has acquired. 

I've added on to his version by picking out the User ID and User Rank as well for a full view. 

It would be great if this could be packaged into the Alteryx workflow as part of the Alteryx Designer app so that users everywhere can benefit from this. 

The benefits are most profound when you want:

1. A way to measure your team's Alteryx progress via the Community
2. Marking it as part of a KPI as part of performance reviews or to serve as justification to maintain license

Of course, there are many more reasons and I am sure that the community will improve on the workflow further to include other items as well. 

A time-series component of when the badges were earned or even user activeness in postings, comments, likes, etc. can also be measured. 

There's a thousand ways to take this, and I think it is worth sharing with the community as an idea!

Thanks all!

-Cal

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.

I'd like to suggest an ability to post kudos to Alteryx employees who help customers.  Let's turn positive feedback into swag or other benefits to those folks who go their extra mile for us.  

cheers,

 mark

It would be nice if the answers marked as solved were highlighted a little better. Currently, there is a little checkbox next to the start of the answer which can be hard to see when scrolling a longer list of answers. It would be nice if the answer was promoted to the top and also highlighted all in green (or at least a border.) that way it will be apparent when browsing through the chatter. 

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!

Hey wanted to see what people's interest would be for a certification around the intelligence suite?

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).

Hi all,

@Joe_Makopointed out to me yesterday by a PM that the export & package tool for Alteryx has a known defect, where the nested macros (a macro inside a macro) don't export properly.

That set me thinking - what's the best way for the community to log defects, and I'm wondering if there's a place for a section on this forum for defect reports?   That would also make it easier for the Alteryx team to parse out defects (which folk like @Ned care very deeply about) from other types of posting.

This would have to be heavily curated though - in my experience, a large number of defects raised for systems I've managed over the years have not been defects, but actually users not understanding the tools - however these did give us very valuable insight into usability; training; etc.

So -  if we had a "Potential defects" section, and if the more senior members of the community had the ability to curate along with alterxy, we should be able to do something good here:

Curate actions needed:

- move some to "Ideas" if they are new functionality

- move some to one of the discussions thread if they are actually a usage question

- Escalate some to the technical leads at Alteryx

- the alteryx team could workflow them in the same way as the ideas but with an additional step of "replicatable example pending from user"

Let me know what you think?

Currently when you add an event to your calendar, the invite includes a link back to the events page. This does get you to what you'll need, but would it be possible to include the link to join the event directly in that calendar invite? Maybe this is a phase two thing but it seems like it would be nice to join from my calendar instead of my calendar taking me to a webpage then joining from there.

I'd like to suggest adding a feature to automatically @ tag/mention the person you are replying to. I've seen sometimes users (especially those new to Community) forget to @ the person they are replying to, assuming by clicking reply the other person will get a Notification, but that's not the case. I think this feature will make a difference so people don't have to turn on "Email me when someone replies" or subscribe to the post to get notified of every single reply.

Alteryx For Good Activity in India is AdHoc (based on when the charity organization was on-boarded and based on the nature of the Alteryx use cases they have) hence, we will rarely be able to follow or get the existing Alteryx For Good week badges.

The suggestion is to create new badges that can be allocated to individuals who participate in such events/activities.

This will help to keep up the momentum of the volunteers!

(I understand tracking can be a challenge, but we can use eventbrite portal to track the attendance.)

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

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.

It would be great to see an email with the Top Idea Submissions at the End of the Year sent out to everyone who is registered on the Community to encourage participation going into the next year. 

Ex:

What feature do You most want added to Alteryx? Vote before January 14th.

We have added over X number of features in 2018 and are looking for your input for 2019 features (see below for some of the top ideas currently on the community):

1. Programmatic Detour

2. Between Operator Function

3. Containers should move other tools when Expanding Collapsing

4. Append YXDBs

5. SQL syntax highlighting

....

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.

Hi all!

This idea stems from my team's need to have Alteryx materials on hand. We have a repository internally built to store all Alteryx related presentations and materials, but it would be great to have it available to Community members if it comes directly from Alteryx.

For example:

1. Presentation slide templates with high production value curated by Alteryx can be shared to Alteryx teams to showcase results, workflows, value engineering, and so much more! It should also cover common topics like how Alteryx and IT Security go along, the requirements to run Alteryx, what is needed to use Alteryx etc. This helps teams get passed the hurdle of actually introducing Alteryx to their companies too. 
2. It will also be good to have slides or PDFs that explain roadmaps, best practices, and a sample doc which all teams can use as a base for their governance or just for references. 
3. Alteryx image assets (as long as it used strictly for Alteryx purposes / demo and not outside commercial purposes) will be great too! Adds flair to what we do in our documentation. https://community.alteryx.com/t5/Alteryx-Designer-Desktop-Discussions/alteryx-tool-icons-to-download... This discussion is pertinent! 
    

Thanks!

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)

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

Cheers,

Mark