I wanted to make some suggestions for comments as you guys evolve them. This is coming mainly from my extended use of a ton of apps in the last several years, and none seem to be able to pull all the best methods for implementing comments all in one place. You guys have a good chance to do that now!
Resolving Comments
I’ve seen a great way to close out comment resolutions in some apps where they will prompt an extra comment around the “resolve” action. In most cases, you can simple check “resolve” and the comment may disappear, and take on the status as “resolved.” But in these implementations, it’s not clear what happened. So you can easily lose context and another user accessing the entity may not understand the resolution.
I think it would be great if there was some kind of prompt for one additional comment when resolving. This could be an option that the admin can set via preferences, if you guys don’t think all teams would want it.
Here is an illustration of our a chat app we use, Twist, handles this type of situation. It works very well, one of my favorite features of Twist.
Jira will also let you customize an issue so when moving to a certain “done” status, a box will pop up asking for what happened to resolve the issue, and that info is written into the comment string.
@mentioning acting like an “assigned” comment and mini todo: I’ve seen a few instances where @mentioning another user will create a sort of todo for them. This is very useful for things that might need to be done around an entity, but don’t warrant a full new task. For example, I was in a meeting going over some development items and a card came up with an incomplete description. My colleague said “oh, sorry, I’ll fill that in later.” So as the meeting moderator I was tempted to initiate a task for him, but that is a a lot of overhead. If I could simply in comments do a quick @mention to him and add “can you complete the description” that would be sufficient, but in order for this to get done with traceability, it would be great if this is something the Fibery system reminds him of. One idea would be to include all such assigned @mention reminders in a dashboard of “my work,” alongside assigned entities, if you guys plan such a dashboard.
Thanks guys and eager to hear if you think these are viable solutions!
The handling of @mentions as a form of “light” tasks/to-do is interesting. I am not sure how best it should be setup, but I like the idea. I have wanted a better way to manage and relate to my @mentions as well. Read/unread status is not necessarily enough.
Perhaps in a future overhaul of the Notifications section, it could become a place to manage or interact with your work in a simple way. So performing simple actions like “Add to reminders” (which could work actual task entities as well as other notifications such as @mentions), or “Mark completed”, etc.
That is why I think one specific way this can be handled is when resolving a comment, simply prompt for another “closing” comment, so it’s possible to see what was done to resolve the conversations. TargetProcess in fact has a great feature where you can configure workflow transitions to require a comment, that would be terrific to see in Fibery!
This is also what I had in mind with this suggestion:
With a feature like this, you could even use entities as “mini conversations” like in the Twist example I showed above. If you required a comment when moving to “closed” state, you can then be sure that those that are resolved have traceability as to what was done.
I wanted to add on here some more re: how much needed is some additional capability around @mentions and the functionality around them so the @mentioned user makes sure to see the mention, and react. My team has been missing these routinely and it’s causing large productivity issues.
Right now, if you use an @mention, the most natural, intuitive way in any Work Mgmt app to call out another user, the only way that user can see this is in the Notifications Pane. This is where issues start:
you can’t see the context of the mention. So it’s easy to bypass the mention because if you are just glancing through notifications, you won’t see what was asked of you, and you can be prone to forgetting to go back and check
the “redness” of the Notification area does not jump out at users. So in the daily flow, it’s easy to ignore this area
There is no way to resolve an @mention. There is no area showing how many @mentions are “outstanding” that need to be read and resolved.
I’d like to continue to suggest some feature build around this that would solve the issue:
When Dashboards arrive, have a user’s @mentions as an integral part of that Dashboard. Allow for the resolution of the @mentions, so that it’s possible to “check them off” to show they have been addressed. A cool addition to this would be some kind of return info or notification to the author that the @mention they assigned has been dealt with
Per my mention of the Twist.com app above, it would be great to have some ability to comment in a resolution about what you actually did to resolve something. Often when I see apps that have a simple checkbox next to comments called “resolve,” I wonder how you can know what was actually done to resolve something?
Thanks guys and hopefully all this will give you some good ideas around building this feature, which I really hope to see soon!
