Educating/Communicating Platform Limitations to Users

Educating/Communicating Platform Limitations to Users

  • I'd be interested in knowing how other Telligent clients address this issue.  We have identified a not insignificant number of user experience issues due to the way the platform was intended to be designed, the depth of customization that would be needed to resolve them, resources and other issues.  I'm wondering how others handle this situation in a non-technology way?  What processes or features do you use to explain these limitations, clear up confusion, etc. to provide a better (if not ideal) user experience?  Obviously, we don't want to respond with a "too bad, so sad" attitude and the issues are too wide reaching to just include in an FAQ (which would be depending on a user locating and reading through an FAQ to find if the issue is related to the platform).  Any ideas?

  • Hello npekala,

    I am confronted with the same situation. But what i am really interested in is; what kind of issues are you confronted with. I know mine are about the limited comprehension of users of the difference between a community and social networks eg. Telligent Community and Facebook. What are your issues? You have some examples?

    Kind regards, Frank

  • Hi guys! Yes, NPekala (What’s your first name?) it might be helpful to provide some examples of specific issues you are running into. We might be able to supply some answers. :)

    Frank, have you ever seen our brief little overview video that helps explain the social eco system? www.youtube.com/watch

    Our CTO Rob Howard also narrates a more in-depth explanation. www.youtube.com/watch

    Check them out and let me know if you they may help you explain social networks to your team. If not, I'd love some feedback on where we can improve. Let me know!

  • Hi Jenn and and Frank.  Sorry, I only now saw your responses.  The kind of issues we are facing are wide ranging.  For example, tabs in widgets that are not what our users think they mean (i.e., Recent Users in the Group Membership widget means most recent user activity in the entire community, not the group) or getting a friend invitation email and directing the invitee not to where you can directly accept the invitation but to the profile.  By themselves they are not that important but they add up to a number of issues that causes confusion.

    The other thing we wrestle with on the Community management side is the fact that we customized our Telligent community.  Now, we're doing an upgrade and we're being told by IT teams on both sides that any change (including minor messaging changes in email templates) are complex and could cause problems with the platform or future upgrade.  As a result, we're not able to clear up confusion in email language for users.

    I'd really be curious to know if most clients customize the platform or just use it out of the box?  We use it for a public facing community (rather than internal or support community) and I'm finding the slightest thing we want to change for our users is being positioned as a potential risk to future upgrades and performance.

    As a result, I'm looking to do things like add a Report a Bug widget in each group to allow users to report their confusion or problems they're having, creating more extensive FAQs and other content managed types of solutions.

    Also, we're opening up the gate on our site but are still requiring authentication that's tied to our organization's database.  Yet, I'm finding many of the new features are not available to us because of that (facebook/twitter authentication, RSS feeds by tag, etc.)  Do other clients require authentication or are they mostly fully public?

    Sorry for the long post.  Just excited to hear from those who are on the side of championing their users :)

    nancy

  • Dear Jenn,

    Thankyou for thinks. That explains a lot to me. I will have a look at the whitepapers and seminars as well.

    Thx Frank
  • Sure thing, Frank. :)

  • Hi Nancy. I'm sorry for this awesomely late reply. I don't know how I hadn't seen your post before. My apologies. I think I have seen you addressing some of these topics in the CAB. Have you received some satisfaction on your issues? I know customizations and updates can be a bit of a pickle in some cases. Would be good to know if you found solutions - especially ones that others in the community might be able to learn from. Please let us know. Thanks, Nancy!

  • thanks for the information! really is very important