e14 changes and updates

dougw said:

cstanton 

Hey doug!

dougw said:

So....how are things changing since Tariq left?

We have had changes in the team after we restructured. There has been a lot of work that needed to be picked up, processes put in place and documentation written that was not written. We are still going through this process.

dougw said:

Are there new personnel in the works?

Haven't you met Addy:  Hello! element14 Community Members or Jordan:  Hi everyone!? They joined the team recently. We are still hiring for a designer and video editor based out of our Bangalore office in India.

dougw said:

Are there changes to Project14 coming?

The political answer would be "There are no changes to Project14" to be " technically correct, " but I suspect your real question is "When is the next Project14 going to be?" I'll address this in a moment.

dougw said:

Are there changes to other programs?

They are currently reduced in number while we transition workloads, but we're still doing RoadTests, Webinars, Design Challenges, element14 presents, Tech Spotlights, Essentials, Quizzes, and thinking up new ideas.

dougw said:

Is there a schedule?

Was there ever a schedule? I believe we've never posted one to the site before. We are planning our activities for the next fiscal year, and we have not set in stone what we are working on yet, that includes Project14. We are also still onboarding the new staff, recently we resolved issues with shipping out prizes and managed to get the Project14 Time and Space prizes out of the door to the winners - which took up to a year before for some reason!? That should also answer your first question.

For me I come to this thinking "What's the most rewarding for our members? And what makes sense for the website?" for example, we currently keep creating groups to support different programmes and that saturates and dilutes navigating the website. I'd like to consolidate it all down a bit to support the same programmes but not get lost when navigating.

As always I appreciate the time and attentiveness given by our members to the Community and asking the engaging, difficult questions. We appreciate you.

dougw said:

cstanton 

Hey doug!

dougw said:

So....how are things changing since Tariq left?

We have had changes in the team after we restructured. There has been a lot of work that needed to be picked up, processes put in place and documentation written that was not written. We are still going through this process.

dougw said:

Are there new personnel in the works?

Haven't you met Addy:  Hello! element14 Community Members or Jordan:  Hi everyone!? They joined the team recently. We are still hiring for a designer and video editor based out of our Bangalore office in India.

dougw said:

Are there changes to Project14 coming?

The political answer would be "There are no changes to Project14" to be " technically correct, " but I suspect your real question is "When is the next Project14 going to be?" I'll address this in a moment.

dougw said:

Are there changes to other programs?

They are currently reduced in number while we transition workloads, but we're still doing RoadTests, Webinars, Design Challenges, element14 presents, Tech Spotlights, Essentials, Quizzes, and thinking up new ideas.

dougw said:

Is there a schedule?

Was there ever a schedule? I believe we've never posted one to the site before. We are planning our activities for the next fiscal year, and we have not set in stone what we are working on yet, that includes Project14. We are also still onboarding the new staff, recently we resolved issues with shipping out prizes and managed to get the Project14 Time and Space prizes out of the door to the winners - which took up to a year before for some reason!? That should also answer your first question.

For me I come to this thinking "What's the most rewarding for our members? And what makes sense for the website?" for example, we currently keep creating groups to support different programmes and that saturates and dilutes navigating the website. I'd like to consolidate it all down a bit to support the same programmes but not get lost when navigating.

As always I appreciate the time and attentiveness given by our members to the Community and asking the engaging, difficult questions. We appreciate you.

Thank you for the update!!

All good. Thanks for the explanations. We definitely appreciate all the work that the staff put into this excellent forum.

Thanks for update, but actually there is "schedule" mentioned in header of Project14 main page:

And at About Project14 link in right, there is bullet:

• Every month there is a new project theme poll where you get a chance to also submit ideas and images for future project competitions.

But note that even when Tariq was in team, it very rarely went so quickly.

I would call that wishful thinking rather than a schedule, it regularly slipped from being monthly, and over time slipped from being monthly.

A lot of information about Project14 needs to be updated, thanks for pointing that out.

Thanks for the update.

I prefer a nice simple website.

When things become hard to find, I tend to just skip them.

As always, I appreciate the effort the team is making and I know it will be a while before you get everything back under control.

DAB said:

I prefer a nice simple website.

Same. We have a lot of cleanup to do after 10 years of Community, and marketing trying to make the Community anything and everything. There was a group dedicated to some speed racing challenge from over 5 years ago. We didn't need that anymore.

Thanks for the update! I've only been "active" here for a handful of months, despite having an account since forever. The site's structure is definitely a bit intimidating and confusing, so it's good to hear that some consolidation efforts are happening. And visibility of all of the initiatives becomes a bit of an issue when there's so many sections. For example, I didn't even know about Project 14 until quite recently when someone mentioned it.
The more I browse this community the more I like it, but the site is not particularly easy to navigate, so I feel like I might be missing out on a bunch of cool stuff, and that I'm discovering them at a very slow pace.

battlecoder Are you mainly using a mobile phone to browse the site?

I agree, the site is a bit confusing. It's not a technical problem, the site works as intended, it's the organization and menus for me.

Here's one example:

I go into Products -> RoadTests (I really don't think this should be in Products by the way, just because it involves products)
There's a bunch of menus at the top, which is really confusing. Let's go into "Documents". Now I can choose between "Documents", "Polls", "Setup"(whatever that is).

So I need to go to Documents -> Documents, to actually see documents. There's also Documents -> Polls, which is the same as just going to Polls immediately.

What's the point of the Files and Mentions buttons? Or the Sub-Groups button, when there's nothing in it? What is the Tags menu good for? It just shows a bunch of tags, which really don't need a separate page.

Or another example, Challenges & Projects -> Raspberry Pi Projects, and Products -> Raspberry Pi go to two different pages that look essentially identical, but aren't. I understand what the difference is after some time of using the site, but new people won't immediately get it, and it's very confusing.

It's a lot of these small issues, that result in awkward and cluttered interfaces, and having a hard time figuring things out. There's a billion options on screen, with less than half being actually something anyone would want.

vmate said:

I agree, the site is a bit confusing. It's not a technical problem, the site works as intended, it's the organization and menus for me.

The issues you touch on here are caused by three issues:

1. Opinion-led UI/UX decisions by staff members. Which like strange persons lying in ponds distributing swords is no basis for a system of government.

2. How verint works 'out of the box', by default it has a lot of cyclical links, most are unnecessary, others are more intended for an 'intranet' style design or an assumption of how people use a web site. Often due to needing to update and patch the site, we do not touch 'core functionality' lest it breaks things. It can take them 16 months to change anything.

3. When we moved from Jive to Verint within the space of a year, it was a struggle to get all the groups designs up to standard. A lot of them are still lagging behind, and some of them should be incorporated/flattened/redesigned (especially due to point 1).

vmate said:

It's a lot of these small issues, that result in awkward and cluttered interfaces, and having a hard time figuring things out. There's a billion options on screen, with less than half being actually something anyone would want.

I appreciate the feedback. When I can throw resources at it, we'll have substantial changes made. Anyone who pays attention to Feedback and Support announcements may notice that we usually have a development release every month, and that's been on hold for a while, we're mainly pushing out fixes when things break in a major way at present - but there is a queue of items waiting that are in development being worked on until then.