Africa Youth for Peace and Development Organization AYPAD

Hey Elizabeth - I'm really glad you've help bring more attention to the communication system.  We're undergoing a full scale redesign of it, and are committing a significant portion of our project roadmap to building this into a functional system.  It's been good to hear how the current system falls short to point out what features need to be really be provided to make communicating enticing, rather than a chore.

For one thing, we are looking into a better way of integrating your email account with WiserEarth messages.  Users have given feedback that not being able to hit the "reply" button to send a message back to the sender has made communication very difficult.  There's a few various approaches to doing this, as there are issues to work around, primarily the email privacy of the sender, but regardless, the overall goal is to allow users to reply comfortably from their email inbox rather than having to log onto WiserEarth.

Another is allow members to send messages out to their network, and to create "contact lists" as you would normally do in an email client.  This would also allow members to compose messages to multiple recipients, with similar "CC:" options as in an email.

A third is to offer a list-serv/mailing list functionality for groups.  We've rolled this out on a testing basis for a test group on WiserEarth, and have seen a significant increase in communication.  It showcases how people are very comfortable and have a strong preference for communicating from their email client, versus going onto a site.  We are exploring options on how to integrate the discussion and membership of a mailing list with the group, such that posts are web-archived and web-accessible, and members can post/reply both through their email and on the website.

And I believe a previous suggestion of yours, to have the subject line show up versus a generic "John Smith has sent you a message on WiserEarth" is coming up soon.  There are some tricky issues there, since we don't want users thinking it's an actual email and hitting the reply button, but we'll work it out as we go along.

The discussion on this page has been moved into the Area of Focus suggestions group:

http://www.wiserearth.org/group/aof_suggestions

Hey Eric, 

I thought it might be nice to address each of your points head-on, since a lot of them cross over with the work we're doing across the site.  My responses are below underneath each point.

1. I would like to see the e-mail functionality more like that of gmail.  I know gmail saves drafts as you are writing so that if something crashes, you don't lose your draft.  I know I will save this before hitting send, because I have written e-mails previously on WE and have had them totally lost after hitting send.  Even Word will be able to recover after a crash.  It would be nice to save draft and then come back to it later.

• I'm not sure how feasible it is for us to have an auto-save system for editing drafts and open documents, but it's something that we can ask the developers about and see if they know of solutions to do this.  It would be a welcome feature for sure, so if there's a way of doing this without requiring Google like resources, we will look heavily into it.

 

2. Another way to do e-mail would be to set it up like they do on meetup.com.  When you send a message from within meetup to someone else, they receive it in their own e-mail system.  I receive e-mails from them in my gmail and then I can respond directly from gmail.  With WE, I get an e-mail from WE that gives me the message and then I need to go back into WE to respond.

• This is a really good idea and we're seeing this come up as a popular and needed improvement.  Users are letting us know that communication on WiserEarth is rather difficult, especially since they're not taken directly to the message that they want to compose a reply to. 
• We're drafting up a new revamp of the email communication system and I've taken a look at Meetup.com's approach.  It could definitely work for us, and I've put their approach as one possible solution for us to design toward.  Thanks for the suggestion!

3. I would like to be able to forward messages and pick recipients from a list.  Right now I don't see anywhere to go to just send a message and then decide who to send it to.  I see that I can send to an individual, or I can go to a group and send a group message and then pick from the members of that group.

• This goes hand in hand with the redesign of the current email system.  Having greater address book features like being able to create mailing groups so that you can send messages to particular segments of your network would be very useful for many people.  We will make sure to integrate your network into your emailing system.

 

4. When I am viewing a particular event or resource, I would like to be able to share or send an e-mail out from that event or resource to people I think would be interested. 

•  So I think this is a function that is provided for by our ShareThis widget - not only does it allow you to post to other sites, but there is an email function for you to share with specific people.  Unfortunately, it's quite hidden, and there isn't much explanation for it.  I think we can and need to do a better job highlighting its role to help promote and propagate content.

 

5. We need to streamline the event posting.  The time format is particularly frustrating.  We should be able to enter the numbers directly instead of scrolling through.  The default time interval is also 3 hours.  Events are commonly 2 hours, so I have to scroll through 23 hours to set the ending time.  The minutes seem to correlate with the time that I am creating the posting.  If the minutes are at :05, then I need to click my mouse 55 times to reset it to :00.  There are too many areas of focus.  I don’t bother selecting them because it takes too much time.  People should be able to post events quickly.  I would like to be able to add attachments to an event posting.  I have had some events that don’t have a web address, but a pdf exists of the event posting.  If I can add a pdf as an attachment to the event posting, that would be helpful.

• Two things here - we completely agree the time portion of the calendar picker is horrific.  We're removing it out and cleaning up the calendar picker and the changes should be live by the first week of december.  We're also redesigning the content creation fields for events, and we'll be cutting down what's need, and streamlining the interface so that it's very easy to speed through the process.

• Regarding attachments, you are able to do so now - but it does take more work than what is ideal.  I'll describe the process first:
  1.  Click on the Files and Photos tab on the event page after you've created it.  Upload a file, then right-click on the Download file and copy the link location.
  2.  Go back to your event's About page, and edit the text to put in the hyperlink.  Now, any users can just click on that link and they'll start the download of the file immediately.

• Now, that's a lot of steps for an attachment.  So I think we can accommodate some interface where you can add an attachment more readily during the creation process.  We will look into factoring this step in for the event creation process.

 

6. We need to have a better way to cross reference between handles (GreenEric) and names (Eric Olson). It would be good to have all the contact info more easily referenced.  I think if we can model more along the lines of gmail, LinkedIn and Facebook, then people would stay more.

• I believe LinkedIN and Facebook rely heavily on the "real names" of the users, and have in the past only assigned some randomized number for the "username" of the person.  Facebook has only now offered what we've always offered - the so called "vanity" url that really is a custom username in disguise. 
• We are planning on eventually transitioning toward a site that only uses the real names of our users, and to keep usernames more hidden.  Usernames are a popular remnant from Usenet and website discussion forum days, but it seems that people are more readily willing to use their real name these days.  So as long as our users are comfortable with it, we would be supportive of a greater switch toward real names.

7.  Angus, I see now what you are saying.  I have noticed that 'garbage' on other people's e-mails where they must have pasted something from word into WE.  I don't know how anyone would know to use the 'paste from Word' button.  I know that people have gotten frustrated about sending e-mails on WE when all that 'garbage' gets added.  Is there some way to automatically remove that?  I got an error message when I hit send that said something like "html elements were removed", but it still looks messed up.  Since Word is the most common text program, it seems like there could be some autofix.  I would never have known what that 'paste from Word' button was for.

• We can probably help change this behavior by adding a preview button to posts that will let someone see how it's going to look before they submit the information.  There isn't a way that we know of to easily automatically remove this - it's not like every word header has exactly the same text, so you don't want to remove it at the expense of cutting out text.  I agree that the paste as word button isn't very well known - but that's cause it wouldn't make sense to bring it to the attention of the user until they've pasted something in from word.  If we could automatically detect that, then it would make this much much easier.

8.  This is a time when a lot of people are looking for jobs.  If WE can be a good resource for posting and searching jobs (like Craigslist) then it will bring a lot of people to the site.  On the main page in the upper left hand corner if I click explore, then Jobs in the drop down menu, it lists all the jobs in the world, with the most recent first.  This isn't very helpful.  It would be better to open a search window like you get in the main search function.  Then when you get a list of jobs, it is meaningful.

Now that I see how explore works, I don't think it's best to have the most recent in each category first.  I think it would be better to have a search window first.  Once you get the search results from your desired criteria such as geographical area and keyword, then newest first is meaningful.

• There are some talks about how we need to improve the Browse listings, and how we need to implement greater search-like functions into the browse views.  We haven't arrived at anything concrete yet, but we likely will explore this further.

 

9.  I also think that within the My Groups drop-down menu on my page, I would like to arrange the groups within the drop down menu.  I remember someone at the editor meeting mentioning this also.

• Yes, Bedy mentioned this at the meeting.  We talked to our developers about this, and they have said they'd probably need to redo those menus to deal with a few other issues we have.  When we get around to it, we will make a request to allow users to be able to customize that list.

Hey James, completely - it's a by-product of an HTML validator function we put in place to help clean up problematic errors when people starting pasting and combining bad HTML formatting into their text.  It's helped removed a lot of unsightly errors across the site.  One of the unfortunate effects is it tends to flag links that open in new browser windows as suspicious, so it sets it so that it opens in the current window.  We might be able to change that in the settings somehow to lessen this restriction - will post back as I hear from my developers.

I think Jean-Paul might be asking for site breadcrumbs - i.e.

Home -> Organization -> Sierra Club

or

Group -> WiserEarth Translators -> Article -> How to get started with translations

Jean-Paul, is this what you are looking for?  That way you have a clearer idea what part of the page you've navigated to?

JP, sorry for the inconvenience of having the network connections taken down.  We had to bring it down initially because we were porting over to a new search engine, and it's taken longer than we thought to bring it back.  The main problem is the previous interface to add network connections doesn't work well with the new search.  We could hammer away at it and use some chicken wire and duct tape to cobble a working system together, but we're instead taking this opportunity to revisit how to make connecting information easier and more intuitive.  In short, we're taking a hard look at how we'd like to redesign this system, and getting input like this about what our users actually want to do has been invaluable to the design process. 

And I'm glad you voiced that idea of being able to order information as you wish for groups.  It's definitely not the first time we've heard of it, and if we want to promote greater use of groups, we will definitely need this feature.