Product Area as mandatory on Idea creation page

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. 

Hi all! We’re excited to share that this idea has been delivered. You can find the toggle to make product areas mandatory to submit an idea on the product area config page in control. 

Do let us know what you think about the enhancement and if there’s any feedback or suggestions. Looking forward to hearing from you!

Thank you ​@Sudhanshu and rest of the team. We’ll be testing it in coming days.

Awesome, thank you! Looks like I might need to put in a ticket though as it keeps toggling off after enabling when I hit refresh not sure if anyone else is getting this: 

​@Johnk Thank you for mentioning this or I might not have noticed. This is happening for us too. 

​@Sudhanshu Should we submit a ticket as well or is there a broader fix needed?