There has been a lot going on with the innosabi software over the last couple of weeks. Not only did we rebrand our entire CI and introduce a new product portfolio. We also implemented a bunch of new features and updates. To give you quick overview, we want to show you the three most important ones in this article.
Pairwise Voting
Imagine this scenario: you have collected over a hundred great ideas and maybe even went through a first screening step. You are now left with this large number of potentially game-changing suggestions. How do you find the one that truly stands out from the rest? The one that really deserves your attention and resources? We now have just the right thing for you. Our new pairwise voting feature!
Basically, you can select any number of ideas from a suggestion or ideation project and move them to a pairwise voting phase. Similar to a classic voting, it is then up to your selected target group to rate them. But here’s the twist: users only ever see two ideas (the eponymous “pair”) at once. The task is to select the one which they consider superior. Once selected, a new pair is presented and the game begins anew. From experience we can tell you that this is actually a lot of fun. During development and testing with real platform data, we caught ourselves clicking happily through dozens of pairs without even realizing it.
The simplicity for the user and the great gamification design is only the surface. The real magic happens underneath the hood. We adapted a so called ELO rating algorithm which is commonly used to rank professional chess players. The great thing about it: the scoring does not depend on the number of votes a suggestion received. So even in a short voting phase with limited participants – for example selected experts – you can get sound, meaningful results for a large number of ideas. And not just after completion of the voting but in real time.
User Tagging
We are very happy to present the brand new user tagging functionality! The perfect way to bring people together and address the relevant users in your innovation projects. All it takes is a simple “@”.
Imagine you see an idea in one of your projects which is relevant for one of your colleagues. You could pick up the phone and call or write an email to tell them about it. But that seems quite tedious, doesn’t it? Or what about this scenario: You come across a discussion and you know just the right user who can contribute the missing expertise. How would you engage him or her in the ongoing discussion?
We took a lesson from all the popular social media platforms and adopted their way of tagging other users. Whether it is twitter, facebook, or instagram: the @ connects people! We are soon starting the rollout of the same functionality across all our platforms. Once you get the update, you can simply tag other registered platform users in your suggestions and comments via a simple @ followed by their name. The user who gets tagged will receive a notification via email with a direct link to the discussion.
New Blog Interface
We are very proud to present you the new platform blog interface for all innosabi platforms. We have reworked the article overview as well as the article view to optimize the user experience. We received a lot of feedback that users do not always read articles in chronological order but actually want to sort them by topics or screen them in one condensed overview. We took both of these aspects as the basis for our new blog overview. As you can see in the screenshots and stylized layouts, your platform blog will now also use our typical tile view. Each tile will contain title, image, as well as a short preview of the article. Main articles can be easily pinned to the beginning of the page in full width. In addition, all articles can be filtered by tags which you can easily assign to the individual entries via the backend.
Of course, we want the users to have the same great experience after clicking a tile in the blog overview. So we also redesigned the article view. We updated the rather outdated layout to a more modern look. Instead of displaying blocks of running text across the full width, we applied the design cues conveyed by the tiles in all other parts of the platform to the articles. Blog posts now also resemble large tiles which are nestled in buttons for social sharing on the left and tiles for recommendations of similar articles on the bottom. In terms of user experience, this greatly improves the typical flow of interactions with the blog.
