[FEEDBACK] Idea Place to Customer Influence migration problems

[Johan_H]

• There is no tag for SAP Customer Influence, so feedback and bug reports cannot be addressed correctly.
• Account migration shoddily implemented:
  - A registration was required, even though we were promised that accounts would be migrated automatically.
  - Not all necessary account info was migrated. Data needed to be added
  - Account picture was not migrated, and uploading a new one does not work.
  - Idea Place Sessions were not linked to Continuous influence Sessions. The user now needs to find all sessions and implicitly follow them again.
  - Text formatting of Ideas was not migrated, and Headers / titles were dropped making the corresponding IR difficult to read, or even look like gibberish.
  - Some comments or comments on comments were not migrated at all.
  - Some Idea Place Sessions were merged with existing customer influence sessions, or with other idea place sessions that do not belong together. The result at any rate is demonstrated very nicely in the influence session for SCN:

  
  Please note that either these ideas were posted by SAP's own personnel (and thus so cryptic that they are useless to all but the person who posted the idea), or simply do not belong in this session.
  Please also note the secondary negative side effect that relevant ideas are at the bottom of the list, out of sight.

• No introduction of any kind to the Influence site. User gets stranded on a general landing page, with no easy way to get to the sessions they were interested in.
• Only interesting info on My Home Page are the user's own improvement requests. There is no way to customize My Homepage to work for me.
• Search does not work, see screenshots:

  

  

• Improvement requests cannot be sorted by session.

• What is this:

  

• Comments on migrated IRs are no longer connected to each other, making the comment section useless.

• Ideas were followed automatically when commented upon or voted for. This "following" info was not migrated. User needs to sort through potentially hundreds of IRs to click the Follow button.

• The only way to submit a new idea / IR, is through a session's own page. Finding a session's own page is exceedingly difficult.

• IRs can be filtered, but only all or exclusive. Filtering out ideas that are, for example, "not planned", is not possible.

[VeselinaPeykova]

I know it won't make your experience better, but the last screenshot is some kind of history for past navigations, which you can use to jump to a certain page.

It might be useful in a few situations, I guess, but it is not immediately obvious.

[Johan_H]

Always nice to have superfluous functionality (browser back button does the same, but better), so the developers can say that something was done to improve the site.

[VeselinaPeykova]

If they could position at the same place where you left off in an infinite scroll page, then it might be useful, but from what I see, this is not the case. The only situation where it might be beneficial (I think) is if I have hidden the browser buttons in mobile.

My main concern is the performance at scrolling down, which I was hoping to be improved when the site launches officially, but I still get frequent unresponsive script warnings in Firefox ESR 52.3.0 with uBlock enabled and a singe tab open:

[Kuhan_Milroy · Accepted solution]

Hi Johan,

Thanks for the deep analysis. 🙂

In order of your comments:

There is no tag for SAP Customer Influence, so feedback and bug reports cannot be addressed correctly.

I believe you already found this due to the ideas you’ve submitted but for everyone else:

https://influence.sap.com/sap/ino/#/campaign/11

tags: “SAP Continuous Influence”, “Test & Feedback”

Also, I believe we will be making this the single place to provide feedback and just use categories to distinguish. (thanks for the recommendation)

Account migration shoddily implemented (and a few items that follow).

To clarify, your account (first, last, email) and all your ideas, comments and votes have been migrated to the new platform. As well, your primary account which is stored at accounts.sap.com is still used. Ie no new user/pass. BUT, when using a new platform a sub profile is needed to clarify any changes, get missing information and also confirm your agreement to the new platform’s Terms of Use. If you registered and had to complete an entire new profile with new user/pass then please log out of that account and I would recommend not using it.

Please go back and simply log on with your existing Idea Place user/pass and you will be prompted to update/create a profile for Customer Influence. A lot of your existing details will be recognized but you may have to enter a company and perhaps a default user group if you have one as these are requirements Customer Influence has that Idea Place didn't have a while ago.

Account picture was not migrated, and uploading a new one does not work

Account pictures were not migrated. Ideally this feature comes from your accounts.sap.com but I do not believe that's a feature yet.

Idea Place Sessions were not linked to Continuous influence Sessions. The user now needs to find all sessions and implicitly follow them again.

Can you clarify how they would be linked? If you go to your old session on Idea Place, it will redirect you to the Customer Influence one.

Also, to find your favorite sessions, I would recommend filtering the opportunities Filter By\Influence Opportunities\“SAP Continuous Influence’ tag or here: https://influence.sap.com/sap/ino/#/campaigns-all/?tags=%255B%257B%2522ID%2522:60,%2522NAME%2522:%25...

Text formatting of Ideas was not migrated, and Headers / titles were dropped making the corresponding IR difficult to read, or even look like gibberish.

We did have limited data from the export, so there was some improvising, especially on new lines. If you have specific examples, we can look at them.

Some comments or comments on comments were not migrated at all

I only have 2 comments out of 32K+ that didn’t migrate, that I am working to fix. If you know of some, please let me know.

Some Idea Place Sessions were merged with existing customer influence sessions, or with other idea place sessions that do not belong together […] or simply do not belong in this session.

Ideas should not have jumped sessions. Those ideas were likely incorrectly posted prior to the migration. The owner of the sessions should change them to ‘Not Planned’ then post a comment to the submitter, giving the submitter a chance to suggest a proper location.

No introduction of any kind to the Influence site. User gets stranded on a general landing page, with no easy way to get to the sessions they were interested in.

Please go to here: https://influence.sap.com for an introduction to the overall site and a breakdown of the different programs and areas.

Only interesting info on My Home Page are the user's own improvement requests. There is no way to customize My Homepage to work for me.

The homepage does allow you to see your ideas across all sessions and browse them easily. Export them to Excel and see feeds for everything you are following. I appreciate the ability to customize one’s homepage is a nice feature. Let’s add that and what you would want to do to the feedback and ideas session.

Search does not work, see screenshots

A big tip is to use quotes on multiple words otherwise the search engine searches for each word separately. But also a great request to have search recognize phrases.

Improvement requests cannot be sorted by session

True but you can filter. Again another one for the feedback and idea session.

‘What is this’ (in reference to the back button).

The back button allows you to navigate easily back to the idea list from ideas primarily and other areas of the site. We have a feature request to make the entries more clear.

Comments on migrated IRs are no longer connected to each other, making the comment section useless.

I have noticed the comment ordering to be confusing on some ideas. We’re looking into this.

Ideas were followed automatically when commented upon or voted for. This "following" info was not migrated. User needs to sort through potentially hundreds of IRs to click the Follow button.

Idea Place did automatically follow an idea for a comment but not a vote. But you could simply click the follow button. The following data has yet to be migrated, I am hoping to get that soon and have it updated.

The only way to submit a new idea / IR, is through a session's own page. Finding a session's own page is exceedingly difficult.

There was a general submit idea button at the home page but with 100s of sessions to choose from it was overwhelming, so for now, yes, you must go into the session to submit. We made the same decision on Idea Place, with much less sessions.

IRs can be filtered, but only all or exclusive. Filtering out ideas that are, for example, "not planned", is not possible.

If you go to the ‘All Improvement request’ portion of the filter and click ‘Open for Voting’ you will get all ideas that you can participate on – ‘Submitted, Acknowledged’. After that, the idea is in the development process and isn’t open for contributions or votes. This should satisfy most use-cases. With that said, we’ll see, please submit your request for multiple status selection and use-cases.

Cheers

Kuhan

[former_member186338 · Accepted solution]

Any comments on interface design?

[Johan_H · Accepted solution]

Hi Kuhan,

Thanks for this. A few notes though:

1. I meant that there should be a tag here on SCN to report bugs, or ask questions like this one. Bug reports and questions should not be mixed in with improvement requests and left to be addressed some time next quarter (in my opinion).

2. I saw one idea that my comments were removed from, but I can no longer find it, nor can I find other examples, so let's forget about it.
   Though it seems in some of the ideas comments were multiplied during the migration:

3. The filters are only useful if you are (very) familiar with the entire SAP nomenclature, and/or know what topic goes where. In those cases it is likely that you won't be using the filters anyway.
   For all others, this is merely discouraging and confusing:
   

   Let us pretend that I am an unsuspecting new SAP Business One on HANA customer, and I think I have an idea on how to improve the HANA database system. These filters certainly will not get me to the right session, nor will the search. Let's pretend that I know that HANA should be somewhere under Analytics: I enter the search term HANA, and get a boat load of irrelevant crap, I then turn to the filters for help, and after opening the third whatever you want to call it, I see analytics, click it and now get a smaller boat load of irrelevant crap. Will I be using the filter ever again after this? Probably not, but I have just learned (mistakenly?) that HANA apparently does not go under Analytics, and instead I send my brilliant idea in an email to my SAP Partner, where it will die a quiet death in a forgotten Outlook sub folder.

Regards,

Johan

[former_member186338]

It was already reported, but no changes for official launch:

List view with unreadable text!

[Johan_H]

I have been looking at this view, and I can't help but wonder who ever actually uses this list? I mean, I am interested in three different "projects" myself. Are there really that many people who like to search for new projects to get involved with, that it is warranted to give it its own main page?

[former_member186338]

Anyway, the design looks terrible!

And when I want to look on ideas related to EPM I will see:

Looks like nobody tested the page on different resolutions etc.

[Johan_H]

By the look of it, the session you found is specifically for add-in for Microsoft Office. Is this the only session for EPM? I think that the search is well below par.

By the way, at the top is a button with which you get a list instead of these blocks.

[former_member186338]

Default is cards view, for sure I can switch to list view each time... But the card view desing is not acceptable!

[Johan_H]

I am with you on that.

[Kuhan_Milroy]

We have been actively working on making the list view much better. The tile view, which was the original design of the product and works very well for innovative ideas that have cute little images to express the idea, does not serve the improvement request model well. At least I haven't seen many cute improvement requests. A good feature may be to default to the list view.

Anyway, please continue to share these in the feedback area where we can now track them from a consolidated perspective:

https://influence.sap.com/sap/ino/#/campaign/11

[former_member186338]

Sorry, but you simply have a bug with a font size! And this bug was reported before the official site launch. Due to this bug the site look like it was developed by a junior student.

[Kuhan_Milroy]

Sorry lost me. You mean the large character titles? - that's by design.

[former_member186338]

Please find another designer 🙂 The mentioned large character titles contain no useful information, just a waste of space!

[Kuhan_Milroy]

LOL! For some background (not an excuse!) , that area was initially designed for an image and the text is a fallback scenario. We don't want images for improvement requests thus have to get the default. Anyway, this isn't really important, the point is, yes we are aware of it and have been working to improve. Your submissions and votes (and candid comments) will definitely help us prioritize. So keep those coming in the feedback area.

[Johan_H]

There is now an Influence session where ideas for the influence site can be posted and voted upon.

[JL23]

And here is your new car - drive or tell us how we can improve it.

[Johan_H]

The accuracy of the comparison is uncanny 🙂

[lbreddemann]

This is so spot on.

I just had a look at the new site and it's a usability fail. If SAP wants to have customers communicate what they want/need then how about making it easy and obvious how to do just that?

If it is necessary to read through an introduction web page to use a web page then that's a failure. That sort of "sophisticated" usage pattern may be appropriate for special purpose systems (e.g. planes, nuclear reactor controls, ... ) but certainly not for product feedback web pages.

My major impression when navigating to https://influence.sap.com/sap/ino/# is: I'm lost! It's completely unclear where to go to find the stuff might be interested in.

Assuming "Areas of Interest" could have something to do with that is a mean derailer, since it only provides the option to subscribe to tags from an uncurated, flat list of arbitrary words. No product or topic hierarchy, no language or spell checking, just random, manual keyboard typed word noise. Thinking about it, I wonder if this is a sort of psychology experiment...

Thanks to Kuhan Milroy for his effort writing up all his points - personally I won't bother wasting my time with this website as right now it's more busy stealing time from its visitors than helping them to communicate important and relevant feeback to SAP.