Many of our users dislike the recent change which removed the List View from the Ideas menu (https://www.aha.io/support/announcements/2022-release-notes/august-31-2022-list-views-update). It is causing confusion and frustrating our end users that they now need to go to the Roadmap area and search for their Ideas List View report - whereas previously this was at their finger tips. It is perceived as a step back in terms of user experience by our primary users.
Hi, thank you for reaching out. As you mentioned, the ideas lists have been converted into list reports found under Roadmaps > List. This will allow your ideas lists to use additional features like pivots and charts.
To quickly access ideas lists now, you can click on the report links on the Ideas Overview page or you can favorite a report so that it is easy to find under the Roadmaps menu.
Very odd thing to have removed this functionality - or indeed if you wanted us to get more use from pivots and charts, not to simply load the new 'report' from the lists button instead. It wasn't something that needed doing; prefer that focus was aligned to making the overview page itself more useful out of the box i.e. why in the ideas portal can you see a breakdown by category (for the voters) but as a PM I don't have the same option in the ideas overview page? I was forced to create reports that provided the data.
I second Rich B's point; 'Roadmaps' (or 'Reporting' to be more accurate) shouldn't be the 'fix it all' solution to avoid Aha providing out of the box views of the data to help us do our jobs.
also, for those of us that did use the previous list; and had multiple 'views' of the list stored... a delighter here would have been for you to 'auto convert' these into the 'roadmaps/reports' - as it was I've lost the old views and so had to recreate them.
Hi Rich. Thank you for sharing your detailed feedback. This is incredibly helpful as we explore possible solutions in this area.
I wrote a long answer, but unfortunately that was before I signed in to the ideas portal. When I signed in, the draft disappeared. I should file an idea to address that too.
Your summary of the problem is pretty much right.
In short, the problem boils down to the speed with which we can get to a list view in the context of what we were doing before. Ideas -> List would take us quickly to a list of ideas, Features -> List would go quickly to a list of features. Either that list would still be the same as the last time we navigated there, and the purpose was the same, or we could quickly add or remove a couple columns and filters and get the view we needed.
The list view is often an easier way to review or break down a backlog than the Feature board or the Ideas overview. The fact you can report on any data column, etc. makes it great for reviewing subsets of features with different groups or teams.
But now, we always have to step through the Roadmaps -> List menu (2 clicks) then we likely end up in an irrelevant view, so we either have to click through the Views button, Saved views and so on, or create a new view and then click through selecting record types, view type, etc. Either way, you've turned a simple navigation into something that requires time and thought.
The 'Views' button seems underused. On Features Board, for example, clicking it brings up a menu with one option "Recommended views", which are fine for new users perhaps, but for an experienced user navigating around familiar ways of looking at things, it is not particularly helpful. Why not include some links to pinned or favourite saved views there?
Having 'Lists' in the Roadmaps menu seems wrong as well, and certainly made it harder for my users to adjust to the change. Roadmaps are a specific type of output, with a specific purpose. Lists are generally not used to create roadmaps!
I haven't tried creating a dashboard, partly because it suffers from the same problem - you can't just click once and end up at the dashboard you need.
Overall I think people maybe use 3-4 reports per day. A quick way to access pinned or favourite reports might be a good option here, with some context sensitivity based on whether you start off in 'Ideas' or 'Features' being ideal.
Thank you all for sharing your feedback. We hear you and we are going to make this better.
We believe there are benefits to unifying the list reports. So we want to be sure we understand the core problem so we can provide a solution that is even better than the three different list reports that we had before (features lists, ideas lists and roadmaps lists).
Can you please help us validate that we are understanding the core problem correctly?
You (or your users) have a set of key list reports that you use each day to manage your work
Previously it was easy to access these saved reports by clicking Features/Ideas > List. Sometimes you would see the view immediately and other times you could easily get to it from Views > Saved views (because it was a smaller subset of the total reports)
You no longer have an easy way to get to these key reports that you use each day
Please let us know if this is correct.
If so, can you let us know roughly how many different reports you use each day?
Have you tried creating a dashboard with the reports you need? If so, are there reasons why this is not a great experience?
>Hi, thank you for reaching out. As you mentioned, the ideas lists have been converted into list reports found under Roadmaps > List. This will allow your ideas lists to use additional features like pivots and charts.
The feedback from my users is that this is confusing. Using the 'Roadmaps' menu as a generic catch-all for reporting doesn't make sense. Roadmaps are a specific function and specific output with particular significance and importance, but list views, along with several of the other report types, are more commonly just used for everyday housekeeping. Plus, the 'Roadmaps' label changes and becomes 'Reports' for other types of Workspace, so navigation becomes inconsistent. In addition, many views/reports are not tied to a specific workspace, so accessing them from a workspace-specific menu feels wrong.
You should consider creating a top-level navigation that gives easy access to saved views from anywhere in the product. Perhaps also consider allowing users to assign a specific saved view to be accessible from the "Ideas" or "Features" tabs within each workspace so that they can easily access a favourite way of viewing these things.
I strongly suggest the Feature List view to be reinstated, its very inconvenient to NOT have it.
I agree. The new feature is not very user friendly. The option to open a favorite a list is still more steps than we were used to when using the idea list view.
Mostly the roadmap holds features & initiatives, but not ideas. So I don't see the logic of putting the list view for ideas in the roadmap section.
Nick is right this is a worse experience. Feature List was a great view and used a lot with one click. You have now moved it to a less accessible place. Why couldn't you leave it where it was and add the new view?
I agree Julie - this is not a welcome change. Why remove a feature that was being used to replace it with something that is a worse experience?
Thanks for your reply. Our End Users prefer the user experience of their Ideas List report being accessed from the Ideas section - as opposed to navigating to the Roadmaps section and looking for their report (they have lots of report). Even if they favourite it - it is more clicks to access what they wanted.