Early Stage Feedback Opportunity: *New* Community Navigation Interface
Welcome to 2017!
A new year means new opportunities for reflection and growth. As I mentioned in my previous blog post, we have quite a few highly requested Community features planned for roll out this month, but the improvements don’t stop there.
We’ve been working on designing a new navigation interface to help address the confusion and frustration around the tag-based structure of the new Community site. Because of the urgent need to roll out this improvement, we’ve already started working with our development teams to explore the technical feasibility of the enhancements we’re proposing. However, as a part of our renewed commitment to early engagement and user-driven development of these kinds of critical user experience features, I’d like to ask for your input on the early designs of this interface. This enhancement is one of the priority features we’d announced in November.
If you’d like to see the early stage mockups and participate in a feedback session, please comment below. Selected participants will be contacted to set up a convenient time to connect with our team. Please note that all participants will need to agree to a non-disclosure agreement prior to participating.
ETA: There will be multiple opportunities to provide feedback throughout the development of this feature. Initially, we will start with early stage mockups and concept designs. Later on, we will ask this group to provide feedback on working models. If there is enough interest, this may be the initial group to form an ongoing UI/UX advisory group.
I’m looking forward to hearing your thoughts!
Jamie
SAP Community Experience
Oh, new content on the community, very nice, thanks Jamie!
( Again, I found this via Coffe-Corner: https://answers.sap.com/comments/100964/view.html - it's not on the Community-Overview page (yet?)).
But why do you look for a closed group, signing NDAs? Why not share it here with anyone who's interested?
best
Joachim
[Posting my comment again, without links to get past the “Your comment is awaiting moderation.”-Bug]
Oh, new content on the community, very nice, thanks Jamie!
( Again, I found this via Coffe-Corner: https://answers.sap.com/comments/100964/view.html – it’s not on the Community-Overview page (yet?)).
But why do you look for a closed group, signing NDAs? Why not share it here with anyone who’s interested?
best
Joachim
Hi Joachim,
Something about legal compliance and intellectual property and something something...
It's standard practice for external advisory groups who see pre-production development projects to sign an NDA. In this case, nothing hush hush, but more to ensure that proper context is given (e.g. "this is a prototype, not a commitment") when the mockups are shared.
Best,
Jamie
Ok, understood, thanks Jamie!
I lost hopes on the SDN community now.. Because, after this new changes.. I do see any questions coming to my inbox for the groups which I had enrolled earlier and I believe this would be the same case with others as well if so, when I post a question in SDN it doesn't go to my desired experts whom I wanted to... Now, If I have any issues I don't get any resolution... I post some questions during the month of Oct 2016 and still I haven't got any response this wasn't the case earlier..
Hello Jamie,
I have answered few of the blogs and tagged as silver tag. Now I can not able to see the silver tag.
Best Regards,
Kishore K
I really don't understand it. I don't come into the SCN often, but every time I do it get's worse.
Finding things is almost impossible, if you can find something all the links are dead or the information is obsolete.
Posting a question is easy, formatting the question was not the clearest before but it appears to be almost impossible now.
Finding my own question's used to be easy I could see my own posts, now I have to search by my name.
How is this better?
Would it be possible to limit the number of “Activities” that show up?
In this example, there were 9 different ones mentioning the the blog post was updated, and when I open that blog I can’t see what was changed. Is there a way for you to delete the additional “Activities” postings when they are more than an hour old?
On top of that, the blog is in german, a language I can’t read nor speak. Is there a way to default the Language and get automatic translation?
Thanks for your feedback Remi. I will pass it along to Sajid & Moshe, our Activity Stream & Notifications experts.
Best,
Jamie
"the improvements don’t stop there."
They stopped when you phased out SCN. This "Community" is terrible. I use Google now. Bring back SCN.
And I love change ... when it improves things ! And this is not the case here. It got a lot worse.
I know, it sounds like a bunch of marketing BS, but the reality is that we are building the big fixes and in the meantime releasing small improvements where we can.
Best,
Jamie
And in the mean time, you are loosing people. Was there a "change management" team involved with this big "improvement" ? They could have told you that you never publish something that doens't have the same (or better) functionalities as before.
The new UI is clean and at first glance looks appealing, but functionally it is very frustrating to try to find topics related to my area, Business Intelligence. I struggle to find answers and the posts I have made get no responses whereas the former SCN provided timely answers from knowledgeable peers. I used to follow threads and receive emails of recent posts, but get nothing. I have found when I have an issue, I will enter an incident with SAP support because I cannot get support from SCN.
Perhaps this was the intent? To control the content and not have open discussion on products?
I do hope you listen to the feedback and make changes to make SCN a community and not a pretty marketing website.
Absolutely not the intent and that's why we're building a better navigation interface. The current environment is like trying to hop from information island to information island. We're building a highway bridge system to connect all the islands and drawing up a GPS system to help you figure out which highway to take. We acknowledge that there are issues and we're working to fix them.
Best,
Jamie
In a user friendly system, no GPS should be necessary. Figuratively speaking of course.
The relevant content I do manage to find, is 'archived' and does not allow replies. The content may still be relevant and unanswered. This 'archive' posting is stupid
I also think the community is useless these days. I've already complained elsewhere about the impossibility to contribute - I challenged anyone at SAP to show us how to easily retrieve the 10 latest un-answered questions within one specific topic area - like UI5 or HANA. No takers... (of course not; this functionality was buried with the death of the old SCN).
I use Stackoverflow these days, as do most developers. I can only congratulate SAP on effectively killing what used to be the best community on the planet. Great if you manage to re-introduce some features, but I believe it will be too little, too late.
Sure, I got a cool Instagram button at the bottom of this page, but why on Earth would I use it - if not to share my complaints??
RIP, SCN.
Hi Trond,
this should do exactly what you want:
Unanswerd questions on the UI5-Tag, sorted by creation date:
https://answers.sap.com/tags/500983881501772639608291559920477?sort=newest&filter=unanswered
hope this helps
Joachim
That is great if you only care about one tag. But for those of us who follow many tags it doesn't replace what we had on the old SCN in the communications view. It seems this "new" design is only there to force us to click a lot and open lots of tabs or do a lot of back and forth. Neither of which is very efficient in terms of time spent.
Why force me to only look at one tag at a time? Why not show unread vs. read and allow me to track and control it?
It is getting harder and harder to motivate myself to continue to spend more and more time with the community (and I don't think I'm alone here with this feeling).
--Bill
Hi Bill,
I do agree - with so many of us - that things could be way better,
I just wanted to accept Trond's challenge ("show us how to easily retrieve the 10 latest un-answered questions within one specific topic").
best
Joachim
Hello Trond,
Go to https://answers.sap.com/index.html
If you are following UI5 and HANA, these primary tags should show up in a filter as shown below. I am following Using SAP.com and Abap Development:
On this page, please select the Primary Tag first, then sort by "Created" and then Filter further by "Unanswered Questions". This will basically show the results that Joachim presented. But you can follow this method for all your Primary Tags.
Hope this helps. And please use Questions to share your query with the Community. Blog comments are meant only to notify the blog author and thus may not get enough visibility.
Thanks,
Sajid
Hello Sajid,
It's a step in the right direction - but doesn't help if you're following a lot of tags like I "have" to!
For my area (EHS) SAP has decided to create 37 (!!!!) Tags where there was on Community in the old SCN! (Here's the list of the tags)
Why can't SAP re-build the Communities from the old SCN by linking multiple Tags to Communities?
Thanks
Mark
I'm not exactly sure where to put that, but maybe, when re-designing the platform you can take a few ideas of the Ethical Design Manifesto: https://ind.ie/ethical-design/