Product Area as mandatory on Idea creation page

Hi @Beachball3000, thanks for sharing this idea! :) 

Would you please elaborate why you’d like to have this field mandatory? And what’s the current challenge? 

Hello @xiaoyu-shen! We’ve set up the Community in such a way that it serves our SaaS products directly -- i.e., when customers want to raise an idea it’s usually (pretty sure it’s 100%) tied to some aspect of a particular product, there aren’t any other areas that we receive concerns on.

We’ve additionally also integrated creation of topics to our internal tools (as other teams live on other tools) to help manage traffic for our product teams, and it defeats the purpose when a user can type out an idea and not tag it against a product. A lot of time can be saved to not have to categorise ideas and marking it against a product manually by the moderation team. 

I hope this helps? 

Yes, definitely, thank you for clarification of the use case @Beachball3000. :)

We are also in favor of this!
Setting up Product Areas helps us distribute Ideas to the correct Moderator and Product Manager. If there is no Product Area set, it’s easy to lose track.
We would of course then double-check if the Product Area is correct, but we’d prefer if the user has to choose. We have an “other” Area in case the user is not sure.
Cheers :)

We’re also in favor. We have different products for each product area - which means the ideas go to different teams. We’d love to have this as a mandatory option. 

@kristinekukich Hey Kristine! I was digging through inSpired and saw that your request to make the product area mandatory has been submitted as an idea. I would highly recommend voting on this so we can get some added traction on this idea! Any specific comments as to why this is a current challenge for you would be very helpful for our product team! - Joyce

Hi,

Any updates on this topic? :) 

Oh totally 👍 

This is critical for us as well - the integration with our product management software gets stuck when it can’t parse which product to send the idea to. 

Hi all, thank you for your answers here. Having the option for moderators to make product areas mandatory in control will be tackled soon. Hard to give an exact timeline but ideally it will come in the next quarter, after we are done with introducing categories for Product Updates and Ideas modules. 

Have the requirement for a customer too. More flexibility in the fields would also be useful, e.g adding a custom dropdown based upon a previous choice and deciding which are mandatory

@xiaoyu-shen Any insight into the roadmap for this idea? Like @Beachball3000 , our entire internal process breaks when we get ideas without a SaaS product attached to them.

We are in need of this as well! We’d also love the ability to add a template to the description of the idea form so we are getting all the information we need. No more requests as one-liners! 

We would really like this idea to be implemented as well! We would like to enforce a product selection on our users when they create an idea. 

Hello Gamechangers

Is this IDEA on a roadmap already?

CC / @olimarrio 

Needed to get PMs buy-in on using Communities for ideation. No one wants to sift through uncategorised ideas that aren’t relevant to them! If we can required product area, we can have our PMs look after their own areas without missing ideas.

Hi everyone, thank you for sharing your thoughts on making the “Product Area” a mandatory field. We’re currently exploring improvements to product areas, and this suggestion aligns well with our vision of a more organized and actionable community.

One question we’re considering as we evaluate this change is whether making “Product Area” mandatory could impact submission rates. Would users find it a barrier, potentially resulting in fewer idea submissions?

In my opinion, it won’t create a barrier. In the end, members expect their ideas to be reviewed and potentially implemented. By making the "Product Area" mandatory, it should streamline the process of getting flagged to the relevant team at an earlier stage.

​@Sudhanshu I agree with ​@Grzegorz Byrski. Our plan is to create guidance for members around effective use of the Ideas area. The message would be about making their ideas more impactful, and would include information about what each status means, what the different Product areas are, our review process, etc., all in order to increase trust and transparency. 

Toward that end, if you’re looking into improvements for this area anyway, control over the fields themselves on the submission form (i.e., the ability to add or edit fields) or link to resources like I described above would be a vast improvement.

Some possible examples:

• For our products, the system a customer is running the product on matters, so the ability to add fields to for them to say whether their idea is unique to their setup or would affect all users would be helpful.
• Or a field for whether their idea is for new functionality or an enhancement to existing functionality.
• Ability to add a tooltip link next to the Product Areas field, e.g., “What’s this? Learn more about Product Areas” that links to the article that describes them.

​@atwhite What are some fields that you think might be missing in idea creation form?

​@Sudhanshu It would ideally be best to have our own customization options here as the fields we want would not be universally applicable to all customers. I can’t remember all the different things our Product team has asked about adding to the form, but for us, things like:

• Financial Core Provider
• New Functionality, Enhancement to Existing Functionality, ??
• And even the ability to templatize the form to guide users in submitting a quality idea, allowing for consistency (which will help our teams review), like:
  • Current behavior
  • Desired new behavior
  • Urgency
  • Are you open to custom solutions? (Goal being to help identify early Ideas that don’t impact many customers but that could be solved via a third party solution or special customization, allowing us to meet a need more quickly)

Just some initial thoughts!

I don’t think it would be significantly impacted by that requirement. Most of our users first come to the Community to submit an idea. Personally, any reduction of manual labor on the CM’s part allows us to focus more important items. I also think most people by now are used to blocks like these for most online forms.

Last thing, if a user were to decide not to submit because of being asked to select a product area, that tells me that it really wasn’t that important to them. If they’ve logged in, filled out the form, seems likely that they have the time to do an extra 2 clicks.