Jeffrey Weir on 17 Oct 2020 02:01:48
There are so many design flaws in the Ideas Site redesign that I can't even recall them all. But here's the issues I can remember. I encourage others to leave additional issues in the comments
1. Clicking on an ideas link posted in say Twitter takes you to the idea, but you are then prompted to log in, and once you do, it takes you to the Home page and not to the idea you originally clicked on.
2. Many users have detailed that they can see Ideas on the mobile Ideas site but can’t vote for them even when logged in as there is no visible vote button on some phones.
3. In desktop, clicking Vote doesn't change the text to Voted, so you don't even know if it worked. (It makes a very subtle change to the icon, but it is too subtle to the point that it isn’t a discoverable visual cue at all.
4. The “Top Ideas” and “Hot Ideas” options serve up the exact same list.
When searching, clicking on one of the 'initial' search results then hitting the back button doesn't return you to the original search terms. You lose your search term and must reenter it.
5. "View More" only lets you see the titles of one or two of the results at a time.
The new design does nothing to address “Idea Forking”. Search doesn't show you the # of votes that each one of the forked ideas has. People keep adding the same idea over and over because Ideas does just a bad job of bubbling the most voted similar ideas to the top.
6. I personally cannot see the Ideas site in Chrome or Edge…it just doesn’t render for me. (It did for a time, but it was incredibly slow in Edge). Works fine in Firefox for me. Other users may be similarly impacted.
7. The policy change to only allowing those with organisational accounts to vote has led to what I term “Vote Deflation”: The most popular ideas were voted for when *anyone* can vote. But now, only a *select few* can vote. Meaning the positon of the top N pages of ideas is now effectively set in stone. Earlier popular ideas now have an unassailable lead.
- Comments (21)
- Merged Idea (3)
RE: Fix the redesigned Power BI Ideas site
There are so many design flaws in the Ideas Site redesign that I can't even recall them all. But here's the issues I can remember. I encourage others to leave additional issues in the comments.
1. Clicking on an ideas link posted in say Twitter takes you to the idea, but you are then prompted to log in, and once you do, it takes you to the Home page and not to the idea you originally clicked on.
2. Many users have detailed that they can see Ideas on the mobile Ideas site but can’t vote for them even when logged in as there is no visible vote button on some phones.
3. In desktop, clicking Vote doesn't change the text to Voted, so you don't even know if it worked. (It makes a very subtle change to the icon, but it is too subtle to the point that it isn’t a discoverable visual cue at all.
4. The “Top Ideas” and “Hot Ideas” options serve up the exact same list.
5. When searching, clicking on one of the 'initial' search results then hitting the back button doesn't return you to the original search terms. You lose your search term and must reenter it.
6. "View More" only lets you see the titles of one or two of the results at a time.
7. The redesign does nothing to address “Idea Forking”. Search doesn't show you the # of votes that each one of the forked ideas has. People keep adding the same idea over and over because Ideas does just a bad job of bubbling the most voted similar ideas to the top.
8. I personally cannot see the Ideas site in Chrome or Edge…it just doesn’t render for me. (It did for a time, but it was incredibly slow in Edge). Works fine in Firefox for me. Other users may be similarly impacted.
9. The policy change to only allowing those with organizational accounts to vote has led to what I term “Vote Deflation”: The most popular ideas were voted for when *anyone* can vote. But now, only a *select few* can vote. Meaning the position of the top N pages of ideas is now effectively set in stone. Earlier popular ideas now have an unassailable lead.
RE: Fix the redesigned Power BI Ideas site
My suggestion applies to this site in general. I'd like to see which top ideas were implemented and which ones were not. So a way for you to be transparent with how much you are listening to your users. Wouldn't it be great if you had a reporting tool you could embed in this site to show thru some good visualizations? Hint, hint.
RE: Fix the redesigned Power BI Ideas site
I do use the mobile view of this site when voting for recommended items from tweats etc, but the vote button it's missing. I have tell edge on android to use the desktop view of this site. Annoying when you want to quickly show support for an idea. Would love to have this fixed.
RE: Fix the redesigned Power BI Ideas site
This site, Ideas.PowerBI.com should be accessible to me via my on-line identity (that of my Gmail account) and NOT restricted to a work or school account.
If I were to change jobs, I want my ideas and votes to follow me so I can track them, etc.
Same goes for the Power BI Community site.
Sure, obviously company sensitive data needs to be kept accessible ONLY via an appropriate work or school account, but my work has control over my Power BI Pro license and access to the site. They can revoke that upon termination or retirement or whatever.
But the ideas and community posts should NOT be tied to work or school accounts.
RE: Fix the redesigned Power BI Ideas site
Can you also change the way that the Ideas site turns a human-readable search string into something like %26quot%3BCalc+Group%26quot%3B after you push Enter?
Nobody should be exposed to something like that.
And some kind of "Advanced Search" section wouldn't go amiss either.
RE: Fix the redesigned Power BI Ideas site
Thinking about the Hot Ideas...I'm not suggesting that you run a slow Top N query in realtime based on start and end dates. Just run the query once a day for "Yesterday", "Last 7 days", "Last fortnight", "Last Month", "Last 180 days", "Last Year" and cache the result.
It would also be handy to have a Hot Ideas option that ignores say the top 2 pages, because those pages are hot because they are visible. Or perhaps it would be good to DEFAULT to a working Hot Ideas list, as that shows what concerns the community right now.
RE: Fix the redesigned Power BI Ideas site
On occasions I have posted community posts and when I come back to it via my profile it seems to have vanished but having the URL takes me directly to it.
When posting a new community post, clicking publish sometimes throws an error but doesn't say where to fix the issue. The last time it did it I had a table in the posting and the only way to fix the "badly formatted" HTML was to screenshot the table, delete it and then post the image instead.