Before the decade is coming to an end, we really wanted to share our first review of ideation on our community in order to touch back on all the great ideas that have been shared on inSpired - and of course also what we have done with them! 
We have learned and improved many things around ideation in the past twelve months, but we recognize that there are still some things we could do better going forward. This review is not meant to pat us on our back, but much more to feed back to you so that you learn what we have changed and how this has impacted the ideas that you have submitted, voted for or commented on. Of course we also want to talk about the most prominent ideas and give you a lookout on what to expect for 2020!
First, let’s have a look at ideation in 2019 in numbers
And here’s how we improved the process
Just like some of you who are working with ideation on your communities, we also are going through a process of optimization in the hope to improve the product as well as customer sentiment. In a nutshell, these are the things we have done in this year to make sure that your suggestions are being followed up on in a more efficient and thorough manner:
- Recurring meeting to discuss new & popular ideas
- Better explanation of how we review ideas
- New, clearer idea labels
- More space within the product roadmap to implement ideas
- This review
For the next year, we plan to have more (quarterly) reviews in order to link back to ideas quicker. We are also are looking into some product improvements to make our & your work with ideas more efficient!
Most popular ideas
Now let’s have a look at the most popular ideas of 2019 and their status:
1. Manually grant Badges to users (47 votes / Delivered)
Well, this idea has been sitting on our community and in our product backlog for a while, longer than we or you would have liked - but it’s finally there! We actually delivered a number of further improvements, so that you can make better use of Badges on your community!
2. Schedule an article to be published on a specific day (44 votes / Open)
We would have loved to deliver this as well this year, but unfortunately it had to be deprioritized in favor of other improvements. Surely one of the items for us at the top of the wishlist for the next year, we really see the value of this in making your life easier and also want to be able to use this!
3. Ability to delete private messages (37 votes / Delivered partially)
Since a while now users are able to delete their private messages. We have labeled this as partially delivered as we do not offer yet functionality to delete complete conversations / messages in batches, however by now you can finally clean up some things or revert mistakes in case you send a message to the wrong recipient!
4. Front-end moderation by users (31 votes / Open)
This is a nice one as well, however we have been struggling a bit to figure out as to which extend this should go. The likelihood of us working on something in this direction is quite high for the next year, but the evaluation is not completely done yet - we cannot fully commit without knowing the full scope of what we think we want to deliver on this.
5. We should be able to include images/pictures in pms (28 votes / Open)
We recognize that there is more demand around features for private messages (general attachments, hyperlinking, etc.). As we have rolled out the new text editor on all other pages of our community, we are investigating the time needed to implement the new editor to private messages too - which would enable you to do most (if not all) of these beatiful things in private messages as well! We will come back to this soon as we have news.
6. Opt-out of @mention email notifications (27 votes / Delivered)
Many of you wanted better settings for your users to unsubscribe from notifications. Until 2019, users were not able to turn off @-mention notifications. We have implemented this feature, as well as more clear settings around notifications in general.
7. Suggest existing topics while making a new topic (25 votes / Delivered)
By implementing this idea we were able to deflect a lot of double-content on your community, reducing the customer effort to find an answer and literally forcing community search on users (as most of them do not seem to be motivated to search first themselves 
). While this caused a small dent to the general activity to the community, we feel that it really added to the customer experience!
What else did we deliver?
Of course there have been more ideas which we have implemented, here a full list of all the ideas which we have delivered on in the past 12 months:
Add partner and superuser to primary role
No warning when you navigate away from your active page
Show the content of a topic/reply in the email notifcation
Private message show username in the browser tab
Enable robot.txt file with branded template
Allow @ mentions to work from within control
Ability to convert answer to article
Save as draft option for articles
Crate the option to open in new tab in the case of insert link / hyperlink
Knowledge base improve responsiveness
Add a clearer way to unsubscribe from category subscriptions
Editor jump to insert field when adding a link
Ability to adjust visibility and position of recently online ribbon
Custom height for homepage hero image
Give option to manage the introduction widget
Editor stay put when copy-pasting in a long message
Add banner to community for advertising
Add links to recommended widget
Disable “show as attachment” for images by default
Next steps
As some of you might have noticed, we are currently updating many ideas that we have covered during our review. This also means that we have to close some ideas - another learning for us was to say “no” if
- we don’t see much demand
- it is not a fit with our vision
- we want to improve something in a different way
So expect more engagement by our team in the upcoming days and weeks.
Of course we are curious about your thoughts on this review, our ideation workflow as a whole as well as on specific ideas - so please keep that coming as it helps us to improve the process.
We are also actively looking into the next number of ideas which we will implement in the new year, so keep your fingers crossed and wait for our next update soon to come! :)
