Quicker response to idea's in the Inventor HSM & HSMWorks CAM IdeaStation

[Laurens-3DTechDraw]

There has been a big push from development/Autodesk to move from forum posts with idea's to move to a Ideastation.

This seemed like a great idea but there are a lot of idea's that have over 20 votes and haven't been given a response to. They are still "gathering support".

I don't think they will gather much more support since most of them are totally at the back of the 6 page Idea list.

Can we someone from the development team or kill them or accept them please?

This way we keep adding idea's and clutter it with the feel of it not making any difference anyway.

[Lonnie.Cady]

I agree, I would rather have an idea rejected than have it set it limbo for a long period of time.  Really any participation from ADSK at all on them would at least shine some light if the idea aligns with the direction the software is heading.

[al.whatmough]

Fair point.  We need to be better leveraging the additional status.

• Future consideration is effectively archive
• Under review I I think make the most sense for ones we agree with but will not be implemented yet.

[ArjanDijk]

Hi @al.whatmough, there are now 113 ideas that are gathering support, 13 implemented which are mostly suggestions from Autodesk staff and 12 accepted where 10 came from non-staff (good).

Can you and/or other members of the dev team decide when an idea is more then 1 month old what you want to do with it? 120 ideas that are gathering support is a bit to much in my opinion. As I added a bunch of ideas myself, I would like to know if anything is going to happen with them.

[porsbym]

Hi Arjan,

I just accepted a handful of ideas that we expect to be working on soon.

In a couple of weeks we will be having a team session where we will going over additional ideas.

/Mark

[ArjanDijk]

@porsbym Good to hear!

[ArjanDijk]

Hi @Laurens-3DTechDraw: This is still a relevant topic.

@al.whatmough @porsbym: The list of "gathering support" is now 146, accepted 15 and implemented  16.

Are there plans to go over the "gathering support" and reduce this number?

[al.whatmough]

We do continue to look at these.  We do want to be careful not to archive good ideas.  There are some very very good ideas at the top of the list.

[ArjanDijk]

Hi @al.whatmough, if the development team has the capacity to develop some of the idea's, whats in your opinion a better way to organize them so users are more likely see the ideas that are relevant to them?

[jeff.pek]

Do you have any suggestions here, in terms of how to organize them?

  Jeff

[kb9ydn]

What about moving some to Future Consideration?  As I understand that basically means, "Yes we like the idea and there's a good chance it will be implemented, but it doesn't fit into the short term schedule".  Then when the future arrives it can be marked accepted.

C|

[Rob.Lockwood]

Also, if moving things to 'future consideration' it might be wise to list existing blockers/dependencies, so users would have a good idea of when to re-promote an idea.

[ArjanDijk]

Hello @jeff.pek

Some idea's:

• Put every idea with more then 20 votes in eather "accepted" "refused" or "future consideration". At the moment about 10% of the ideas gets to that number. So that means there is a relevant group that finds the idea worthy. So as development team it would be good to respond to the users that collaborated on these votes by telling them what you are going to do with their opinion/idea
• Reorganize the tab "recent" and put the recently voted ideas on top. This way the ideas that are "hot", stay visible. A "hot" idea from 1 year ago that got 5 votes this week in at the moment still on the bottom of the list
• Be clear when a idea does not fit the scope of the development team. If I create an idea what says "Machinesimulation in Fusion and Inventor HSM" i think I can get on top of the list, but I don't think this idea will be executed anytime soon.

The main thing is that if a user is looking at the idea station, they get the idea that their input matters. At the moment I don't think that is the case.

[kb9ydn]

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@Arjancncmachineworks wrote:

Hello @jeff.pek

• Reorganize the tab "recent" and put the recently voted ideas on top. This way the ideas that are "hot", stay visible. A "hot" idea from 1 year ago that got 5 votes this week in at the moment still on the bottom of the list

The main thing is that if a user is looking at the idea station, they get the idea that their input matters. At the moment I don't think that is the case.

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Right now there are 3 tabs; Newest, Hot Ideas, and Top Voted.  Newest lists ideas in increasing order of time since they were created, which is exactly the way it should be.  Hot Ideas is the one that shows what people are voting for right now.  Simplistically this would be the list sorted by time since last vote, lowest to highest (I think it does this now??).  And then of course Top voted is the list sorted by number of votes, highest to lowest.

As for making users think that their input matters; Well, the best thing would be seeing lots of suggested ideas implemented.  

But mostly at this point I think just more visible involvement is what we are looking for (more state changes, feedback from development on idea status/future plans/technical content, etc.).

C|

[ArjanDijk]

You are right. It would be helpfull to make "hot" the first tab.

[jeff.pek]

Hi folks -

These are awesome suggestions. Please keep in mind that we don't really have control over the overall behavior of the IdeaStation -- I don't think it's even Autodesk-maintained. I will try to figure out whom to raise these suggestions with -- maybe IdeaStation needs an IdeaStation! 🙂

Really appreciate your thoughtfulness and interest. Regardless of the details of the IdeaStation interface, we are absolutely trying to prioritize paying attention to the ideas posted there.

Jeff

[kb9ydn]

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@Arjancncmachineworks wrote:

You are right. It would be helpfull to make "hot" the first tab.

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Actually I would prefer that "Newest" is the default tab, or even better have it so you can set your own preferred default.  The Fusion Ideastation defaults to "Hot" and it's annoying because every time I go to check for new ideas I have to click over to the "Newest" tab and wait for it to load.  With most websites this wouldn't be a big deal but the AD forums are always really slow and it takes forever to load.

C|

[Laurens-3DTechDraw]

@al.whatmough

@jeff.pek

Digging this one up.

Because it's still very much relevant and nothing has changed.

There was a great picture of how good Fusion360 was at implementing the Idea's and how much of the votes they did justice.

With HSM the top 10 voted Idea's only one of them has a status other than Gathering support.

No way the top 10 voted Idea's need more support. 

Kill them off or set them as under review with a guesstimate on when the Idea will be revisited by Development, because this way the Ideastation really doesn't help anyone.

(And a lot of the "ideas" actually are more bugs that need fixing, but they were conveniently sent to the IdeaStation so the fix can be pushed back more easily without people noticing it was actually a screwup.)

[jeff.pek]

HI Laurens -

Thanks for raising this. We actually talked about IdeaStation yesterday, and have a number of them queued up to be part of the R3 releases. CJ is keeping an eye on this, to reconcile "accepted" ideas with the corresponding Jira tickets, and to keep their status updated as we pull them into the backlog.

Obviously, we have to balance a lot of things when looking at the idea station requests. We do give them reasonable weight, but this has to be balanced with level-of-effort and other priorities.

Jeff