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.

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.

The situation here may be that the post was originally created before the move (I can't remember now and finding it wasn't easy) and that a notification to your own content wasn't automatic for older posts - thus Shabaz didn't actually see it???  I think with new posts you are automatically subscribed to notifications on your own content and to content created on the same thread, e.g. I get a notification that you responded to this thread.  Or is it that I'm subscribed to the Members area and I get it anyway.  That's confused me now just even thinking about it!!  

On the old site we didn't have to subscribe to content areas to get notified that someone created content, and indeed didn't get notified.  We didn't need to, actually, because every time one visited it, the Recent Content list on the home page was updated with new things posted, even if it was in areas not particularly interested in.  With that fundamental feature missing, a user has to go investigating to see what may have changed (and actively subscribe to areas they have an interest in.)  People who have been around long enough are likely to be emotionally invested enough to do that; new users probably have no idea that it's something they need to do.  That's potentially the point being missed by those who push back; additionally, can you image being a new user and the first thing you are informed of is to go hunting through the whole site looking for the things you might be interested in and subscribe to them?  Just not going to happen.  I guess from my point of view there are areas that I'm not particularly interested in but other members still post interesting content there on occasion and I just don't see it whereas I would do so on any other 'forum' software.

I try and visit the home page more than once a day in an attempt to not miss anything because once it falls off that page, it's "gone".  Easy for me because I'm retired so able to manage my own time as I see fit.  I do sometimes wonder how many people are creating blogs/discussions that quickly disappear off that home page and then don't get noticed/read because it is no longer visible: a lot of work under appreciated potentially.  Does your usage data show a change in engagement levels?

I honestly believe that technical problems will get ironed out and improve over time.  I live with the weird emails that get generated and with not being able to create content on my iPad or iMac every so often because I can easily workaround them and I expect that it will get sorted at some point.  But in terms of user experience the most beneficial improvement that could be made is to either (a) get rid of comments from basic search results (and a filter to do so for advanced search) and ensure that a post's modified date is changed when a comment is added to it; or (b) create a page, linked to the home page, whose sole job is to present changed (and new) content in a paged list with ordering by modified date (including when comments are added.)  If that was available, then the notification function as it stands now would actually be really beneficial and, I think, work the way it is intended to.  In other words, the fundamental nature of the platform, in terms of notifications, wouldn't need to change.

These things are hard to express and I wouldn't want you or the devs thinking I'm being critical of the hard work.  I even understand and appreciate the need to get off the old software.  Building dynamic web sites is difficult: I led the technical team that created the old Directgov/Dept of Health sites for HMG so I know from personal experience how hard it is, even with UX experts involved.

Andrew J said:

can you image being a new user and the first thing you are informed of is to go hunting through the whole site looking for the things you might be interested in and subscribe to them?

Hmm, there are a few sites where you do actually do this, when you register you're asked "what are your interests?" immediately and you're, by default, subscribed to those interests - but we don't have that kind of prompt here. There's obviously a difference between those options being offered up and having to know to go and find them.

Andrew J said:

I wouldn't want you or the devs thinking I'm being critical of the hard work.

I purposefully ask to get feedback, it would be ridiculous of me to chastise people for giving it :D 

Thanks, this's helping me to articulate the distinction needed in the behavior difference.

This is a REALLY helpful post Andrew J. The recommendations you have here I will take to see how quickly we can affect some of these changes - especially the "recent content" view as you describe it - since it doesn't come with the platform. For some reason Verint is hung up on creation date and nothing seems to be sorted by modified date. We may not be able to change that on a fundamental level in the platform, but we can likely create a different version or new version of a "recent content" widget that would sort by modified date - whether the modified date is updated when a comment is posted or not I will have to check. Also, filtering out comments from certain views or search results seems like something we can investigate as a customization.

I am sorry for the difficulty you all have experienced with the migration and now with these new server issues - when they start "out of the blue" like this one did it is very challenging for us to figure out why but we are doing our best to get the environments running smoothly so we can focus more on the interface issues again.

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.

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 : (

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.