user testing required to improve the Ideas list reports

What is the challenge?

The list report for Ideas Portals (back-end) is clunky and difficult to use. User testing and work shadowing with Aha! users could help improve information retrieval including the efficacy and efficiency of filters, saved views, and exports of Ideas to other locations and file formats.

What is the impact?

🚩 Difficulties that hamper productivity include:

1. When accessing an Ideas Portal from a specific workspace, I always have to triple-check the workspaces mentioned in the filters which are often different from the workspace from which I am accessing the Ideas Portal. If I find relevant ideas but the right workspace is not checked in the right filter, I cannot return search results.

2. When viewing Ideas, it is common to view all ideas from all portals even though I access an Ideas portal from a specific workspace. I often wade through dozens of irrelevant portals because I haven't triple-checked which workspaces are selected in the filters regardless of the workspace I'm currently in.

3. Therefore, it always takes repeated trials to get search results to show in the report.

4. Filters are clunky. When Ideas name is selected as a search filter, or when keyword search is performed, the user interface flashes, so it is never clear if the search filter is added or not, or whether it is actually usable.

5. When exported selected ideas to a whiteboard, I often get the whole list of hundreds of Ideas exported to the Whiteboard, even though I only selected one or several specific ideas.

6. When manually selecting ideas, I cannot select ideas across multiple pages. If I go back to another page view, I see the Ideas are no longer selected because I moved to another page to manually select more ideas. If I select just one idea and export to a whiteboard, I am likely to get the whole list of Ideas exported, rather than the ideas I selected.

7. When searching by idea name, I do not always get all the results that would match the search. Therefore, I need review all Ideas individually to make sure I haven't missed relevant ideas after having performed an initial search by Idea name. This can lead to multiple exports, which can lead to complications as explained in other points listed here.

8. Once a whole list of Ideas has been exported to a whiteboard, the list cannot be moved in the whiteboard, because to move the list one has to be zoomed in closely, and a close zoom prevents from actually moving a bulky object across the whiteboard. Therefore, one has to move all the existing content in the whiteboard in the hope that one can slowly drag the long list of ideas across the whiteboard, one small manual pull at a time, to a desired location.

9. One cannot bulk select ideas for exports using 'shift' + multi-selecting over a range of relevant ideas. One has to select them manually.

10. When exporting Ideas to excel or csv for analysis, the Idea description is not included. So, if the Idea name is not descriptive, one has to check.

On a more positive note, I just noticed one can drag and drop an idea from an Ideas Portal's list report to a whiteboard. Great feature! 💯 I don't remember reading about it. It could perhaps be highlighted in the Aha! Knowledge Base.

Describe your idea

Overall, the List report feature needs to be improved via user testing or similar so that filters are more effective and efficient so that users do not have to adopt ineffective and time-consuming workarounds as a result.

As Ideas Portals are an immensely valuable tool to support customer and end-user research, improved information retrieval capabilities would greatly enhance and speed up data analysis both within and outside of the Aha! platform so that Aha! customers can continue to deliver the best value and experience possible to their own customers.