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

So - there's a well known principle in psychology that people behave differently when they are asked "do you like A" "do you like B" - vs. when you say "if you can only have one - which will you pick".   

This is an important principle for Agile Product Owners because asking your users "do you support this feature" will essentially provide a popularity score - but tells you nothing about which are the most important features to your user base. Where saying to users "Pick your top 5 from this list, in order" - will give you a VERY different result because now people need to think "Sure I'd like this feature, but if I had to pick, it's not on my top 5".     TLDR: the best way to gauge importance (vs popularity) is asking users to force-rank with constraints.

So the idea is to provide Alteryx users on the Maveryx community the ability to select their top 5 features / ideas that they would like to see.    This can be done programmatically in a very easy way by looking at the ideas that get more than X votes, and then adding them to the list.     

The real benefit of this is that the Product Managers at Alteryx get a very clear sense of the most useful / important features - and perhaps more importantly the Maveryx will say "I made that happen" which creates a real sense of ownership & stickiness in the product among the userbase.

cc: @NicoleJohnson @NicoleJ @JarrodT @SteveA @mbaerend 

Thanks to @gautiergodard for showing me the SparkED Job Board!

Introduction

I was actually curious about Alteryx freelance roles in general and what practices are in place for people hiring in terms of data security. That prompted me to post on the General forum here.

I was then led to the SparkED Job Board by Gautier, and I will be honest, it was somewhat difficult for me to find the Job Board through self navigation. Once I found it, I am quite disappointed that the Job Board is not very active nor user friendly to both job posters and hunters. 

It is difficult to find Alteryx specific roles, and it is sometimes also difficult to hire for Alteryx specific persons (one problem I am facing at the moment). 

But then it dawned on me. Alteryx is partnered with many companies - some as vendors selling + using Alteryx for their own clients, and some with direct clients. Surely they must be needing some talent - and with Alteryx having a worldwide reach, surely many partners would be interested in utilizing this free source. 

My Ideas

I think it will be useful to split my idea into a few sections so that it can be seen more holistically. 

#1 Change the Name, Function & Location of the Job Board

Right now, the SparkED Job Board's path is through Community -> Learn -> SparkED Education -> Job Board.

Based on some of the postings there, it seems that the need of people posting tends to sway more to hiring people with some years of experience with Alteryx + general Data Engineering and Data Science skills. It would be more beneficial to put it under its own category in the tabs above like so:

Doing so makes it more prominent, easier to find, and could bring more clicks in. 

#2 Change UI/UX of Job Board

The current Job Board looks like this:

Some tweaks to make it more Job post-and-search friendly would be:

• Changing "Create an article" to "Create a Job Posting".
• Having a direct "Apply" button that notifies the creator of the Job Posting that the user has applied.
• A good resume would be the Alteryx Community profile itself. The badges, profile activeness, certifications, ideas, and user ranks are all things that can be used to gauge a profile. It can also include links to your LinkedIn, GitHub, or any page that has your work on it. 
• The box view currently is hard to see. It would be great if a company name or project name can be seen first + a logo, role name second, location preference, Remote/On-Site, and salary range / project price range is visible in smaller boxes would be more captivating and easier to go through.
• It is also helpful to categorize the job post as either a full-time, part-time, contractual, project, ad-hoc, or training role.
• Have a filter function on top that covers the field mentioned in the previous point + a search bar would be great as well!

#3 Posting Rights

Just as how we post Blog articles on Alteryx, it can be moderated by the Alteryx team.

For example, companies do not necessarily have to create an account on the Alteryx community to post. They can reach out to a community member responsible for this page, and they can provide all the necessary details required to post a job. 

The Alteryx team can decide the level of moderation which they wish to apply, and then check it off with the Job Poster to continue. 

#4 Split Job Board into Job Posters and Job Hunters

Of course, it will be helpful if people could post their profiles indicating that they are looking out. This will be slightly different for job posters, but can still be moderated by the Alteryx team. In addition, it would be helpful to have the following features:

• An icon frame that indicates one is hiring or looking for work as part of the Alteryx Community icon. 
• An anonymous posting in case some users are not comfortable with sharing on the community itself. 

Outreach by Alteryx

As mentioned, Alteryx has many partners worldwide and I can only see the partnerships increasing as the days go by. I am sure that the companies Alteryx work with are interested in getting more talent.

This can be part of the overall package which Alteryx sells. Not just the software that changes lives, but it also comes with a Community that is helpful AND can find you talent to make those transformations a faster reality! 

The community is buzzing with ACEs, top contributors, etc. It will be great to have this feature as well - another golden point for Alteryx. 

Conclusion

Thank you for reading and considering this idea. I hope this idea is taken up by the Alteryx Community and team - I am a firm believer in this as it can help even more people and makes Alteryx a skill more worthwhile knowing in 2023 and beyond.

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.

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

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.

Getting to grips with building tools with the SDK can be quite challenging with multiple sources of information from the Github page to the help docs. A single straight forward video tutorial series on the community would be awesome.

Currently, within the support portal, you cannot upload a .saz file as it is an unsupported file type:

However, this is essentially a route of investigation taken by Alteryx Support, primarily if the issue is derived from a web or connectivity issue. This issue can be worked around by sending an email rather than updating the ticket, however, the purpose of the Customer Case Portal is to provide a single point of access for tickets.

Kind Regards,

Owen

Non English communities lack of a link to the Gallery.

Please add the link.

Thanks

I would like to be notified when somebody posts something new to the gallery. I can't find the button to do that if it already exists.

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.

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.

Hello,

We don't have any place to post idea about the cloud products. Since it's clearly new products, isn't it relevant to ask your users about what they need?

Best regards,

Simon

Hello!
Currently there are a couple of banners on the Alteryx Community with information for users:

However, even if i dismiss/click the cross on both of these, they reappear if i navigate to another area of the community. It would be nice to remember that the user has dismissed them, and have them not pop up again. Otherwise, it may be worth removing the 'x', however i would prefer the former.

Thanks,
TheOC

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).

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

Hello!
Currently, tagging is pretty easy in the Alteryx Community, just type '@' followed by your favourite user, and you can add them to the post. 

However, I've found sometimes it can require typing their full name to find users. I think this could be improved by having a 'suggested', or reordering of the tagging functionality. Let me demonstrate:

If I want to tag @patrick_digan (Sorry Patrick, just using you as an example :) )

I can type @patrick and he does not show up:

This makes me sad. Clearly I love my name displayed in his notifications.


The following accounts are displayed (sensibly, due to naming):

What I'd quite like is a couple of spots at the top of the searching functionality to be highlighted, as a suggested tag based on what you have typed. I think it would be sensible to have this determined by any of:

• Highest Rank (sensible, the sorting already exists in the graphql):
  
• Most recently/most often tagged
• Most active
• Potentially even more interesting, who has been seen most recently in threads (although I imagine this isn't possible easily).

And this would look like:

(yes, I do have certified MS Paint Master on my CV)

This should just to make it a bit easier to tag those most likely to be searched for on the Community.

Cheers!

Owen

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