Server Problems from 20th April - Poll inside and Now Resolved

I just experienced the missing message thing just now, I don't mind retyping since I didn't in this case type a lot, but I think it's confusing the person whose forum question it was, since whatever they are responding to (I can see them typing) isn't appearing for me either. It's like ships in the night, neither of us can communicate with each other.

If it were not for these recent issues, I'd have said the site issues are slightly less, however the main painful thing (lack of recent activity view) is still there, and it impacts a lot, I bet if that's resolved people will be super-happy more happy* with the site.

* Agree that the text when typing messages is tiny, that too would greatly improve usability if it were larger

I think the recent content view - by which I mean a continuous list of content in modified date order, like every other forum site, and without comments - is critical.  I recently added a comment for you in an older post of yours and it never popped up to the front of recent content and you never got a notification because that’s not automatic so that went by-the-by.  Not to worry, I shall ask again at a later date and tag you.  Like me, I suspect people who have been around for some time are emotionally attached and forgive a lot on the expectation that improvements will be gradually rolled out.  But for new visitors to the site I expect they will find it confusing and difficult to engage with because it’s experience isn’t like the majority of other community sites.  Again, all content in modified date order is critical for engagement.

Andrew J said:

I expect they will find it confusing and difficult to engage with because it’s experience isn’t like the majority of other community sites

This's the point that's difficult to express, partly to those who created the platform.

A lot of the push back that I deal with, is saying "well can't we simply inform the users how to subscribe to notifications? Put it in the FAQ and link to that from the homepage, the problem's just that they don't see the instructions on how to do it, right?"

Well, from what you're saying, that isn't the answer and that the fundamental nature of the platform needs to be changed, but automatic subscriptions/notifications simply bother people, so that's not an answer.

This is also really helpful shabaz. Thank you all so much for engaging so thoughtfully with us on this discussion. We want to provide the best experience for you and will do everything we can to implement changes to that effect and ALSO pressure the vendor to make changes in the platform for things that are too fundamental a change for us to tackle as a customization.

I experienced something similar with a product where some features of it were just not making sense for users, or were too complicated to use, etc., and it was affecting usage/sales. It really needed top-down support to resolve, and management allowed us to form a type of 'adoption team' (it had a different name) where we forced the people closest to the customers, plus a couple of developers, plus a sales person, plus a support person, plus an architect, basically a whole cross-section of people across the firm, all into a room for 3 weeks, and we didn't leave until we had a solution, and the promise was that our recommendations would be followed (which did occur). We achieved it by doing in those three weeks exactly what the customer was doing in their business, transforming our room into a customer site, and understanding how they used the product, identifying new opportunities as a result, and also discovering really how a simplified solution was far better than something deeply configurable that no-one understood. This only worked because the development/engineering and all other teams knew the adoption team had support from top-down. It sounds like Verint ought to be doing something like that, if they are providing such responses as you mention to real user problems : ( but it would need senior support on their side, otherwise nothing changes : (

Hi Christy,

This mockup below is quite old now, but maybe there are some ideas that can be gleaned from it, just to ensure that a lot of benefit can be achieved first go, since I believe it captures quite a lot of suggestions for a recent activity type of display to be usable:

Things like: 

(a) A lot more line entries than the current page, so that users don't need to click on next page so often, if the 'forever scrolling' feature isn't possible (that was a nice feature in Jive). Here there are 18 rows of recent content on a single page, but each line has some white gap, to make it not look crushed together.

(b) Title and a snippet of the most recent content (i.e. a snippet of the latest comment, if a user types something in response to a post) would be great, here the title is truncated if it is too long

(c) reordering of some of the columns, so that the most useful/interesting columns appear first; here the view count is separated from the likes/comments, otherwise it's hard to see which number means what, and also the time column pushed to the right. I also pushed the name to the right, because there is a small graphic on the left instead, which takes up less column space. Auto-truncation on the names column too (actually on all columns : ) to save column space.

(d) As large text as possible :  ) appreciate that clashes with the request for many rows of entries in a compact manner (not vertically crushed either, because some white space makes it more readable), still I think it may be achievable if there is just one line per entry. To me the proportions of the below list seemed readable. The current "Recent Content" list has small text. Also I believe a few people mentioned the blue text can be hard to read, so maybe that should be darkened slightly too, or bolded, not sure.

For a mobile view of recent activity, here was a suggestion, probably some ideas here are bad, but maybe some can make sense or give you further ideas:

the squares are random colors from a small palette that are sticky, so that (say) as can be seen, user Jan Cumps is yellow on the first row, and he stays yellow if there are other recent content entries on the page, e.g. user dougw has two entries on this screen, so both are the same color (green). 

Auto-truncation is in all the squares.

Hi Christy,

This mockup below is quite old now, but maybe there are some ideas that can be gleaned from it, just to ensure that a lot of benefit can be achieved first go, since I believe it captures quite a lot of suggestions for a recent activity type of display to be usable:

Things like: 

(a) A lot more line entries than the current page, so that users don't need to click on next page so often, if the 'forever scrolling' feature isn't possible (that was a nice feature in Jive). Here there are 18 rows of recent content on a single page, but each line has some white gap, to make it not look crushed together.

(b) Title and a snippet of the most recent content (i.e. a snippet of the latest comment, if a user types something in response to a post) would be great, here the title is truncated if it is too long

(c) reordering of some of the columns, so that the most useful/interesting columns appear first; here the view count is separated from the likes/comments, otherwise it's hard to see which number means what, and also the time column pushed to the right. I also pushed the name to the right, because there is a small graphic on the left instead, which takes up less column space. Auto-truncation on the names column too (actually on all columns : ) to save column space.

(d) As large text as possible :  ) appreciate that clashes with the request for many rows of entries in a compact manner (not vertically crushed either, because some white space makes it more readable), still I think it may be achievable if there is just one line per entry. To me the proportions of the below list seemed readable. The current "Recent Content" list has small text. Also I believe a few people mentioned the blue text can be hard to read, so maybe that should be darkened slightly too, or bolded, not sure.

For a mobile view of recent activity, here was a suggestion, probably some ideas here are bad, but maybe some can make sense or give you further ideas:

the squares are random colors from a small palette that are sticky, so that (say) as can be seen, user Jan Cumps is yellow on the first row, and he stays yellow if there are other recent content entries on the page, e.g. user dougw has two entries on this screen, so both are the same color (green). 

Auto-truncation is in all the squares.

This is also really helpful shabaz. Thank you all so much for engaging so thoughtfully with us on this discussion. We want to provide the best experience for you and will do everything we can to implement changes to that effect and ALSO pressure the vendor to make changes in the platform for things that are too fundamental a change for us to tackle as a customization.