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).

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 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

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.)

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.

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.

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.

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. 

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

....

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

Cheers,

Mark

I'd love to see the ability to create a private community that would serve as a subset to community.alteryx.com.  Many of us work for large corporations and are unaware of other users within the organization.  We are left to our own devices to attempt to connect and share.  With private communities we could

• enable better networking (who's going to conference?)
• automatically suggest membership to the private community based on email domain or license
• encourage better participation through gamification/badging (competing against peers vs Alteryx consultants and wise aces)
• share knowledge
• identify who the best participants were within our organization (as a way to identify talent)
• reveal opportunity gaps and leverage positive peer pressure (if Joe's department is now certified why isn't mine?)

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

It would be wonderful to have a rich mobile version of the community.

Lithium has an experimental (beta) version out there, and if Alteryx can adopt this we can use the power of the alteryx community to test this and make this bullet proof.

https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=lithium.lithosphere

Hopefully this lithium mobile app can be used on any lithium-powered site without re-engineering?