Does anyone think the (upcoming) smart tagging feature is a good idea?

[skyehansen]

Smart tagging in update stream (https://one.workfront.com/s/document-item?bundleId=the-new-workfront-experience&topicId=Content%2FPr...) is coming up in the next release, and I was wondering if anyone thought this was handled well.

My comment to our CSM was, that the majority of customers are probably like us: the majority of your licenses are reviewer or free licenses and use of a job role is contraindicated in these users (they are not assigned work and roles are a placeholder for work assignments).

This means that exposing a primary role is -- at best -- useless, because the majority will be empty. It will also be useless for identification purposes, because most primary job roles bear no resemblance to what the user is best known for in the company.

At worst users will experience FOMO (fear of missing out) and suddenly start demanding a role for no reason other than to have something show up in that space, or they will start demanding their “real role” (a.k.a. job title).

I asked if we would be able to, at this late date, throw in a vote for the user’s job title? This is more recognizable to most users, AND can be personally set by most users, so will show up on most tags.

But the question to the broader group is, who actually liked having the primary job role exposed to begin with? And why?

[Doug_Den_Hoed__AtAppStore]

Hi Skye,

I first saw this in an upcoming release a while back, and as I recall, one of the main usecases was to help folks who were attempting to tag someone ensure they choose the right person by revealing their Primary Role. That works best with populated and accurate data, but even with that, some users have expressed concerns that revealing that organizational information could either be unhelpful (unless users trying to tag someone "know" the target's Primary Role.), suspect (if sparse or out of date), or confidential (if Roles do equal Titles, and the latter is considered internal use only).

Given that, I wonder if in future whether :

+ making the reveal Primary Role optional at a domain level (aka the lets-agree-to-disagree approach) would be warranted

+ whether allowing a special "Tagging User View" by which a SysAdmin could thereby define the best columns to reveal would be possible

+ showing photos (similar to Slack and others, subject to privacy concerns, above) in the @tag dropdown would be helpful (and encourage people to update them)

Regards,

Doug

[CalvinFold]

I'm thinking someone's entered Job Title is more useful than their Role. Not everyone knows or understands the underlying Role (and thus Rate) structure outside the planners, and the rest don't care. At an interpersonal or work relationship level, people know each other's titles better.

[RandyRoberts]

While your case is probably common, we have 99% paid licenses and everyone has a job role that is almost always different from their title. We base job role on what you actually do, skillset-wise. We do this because we have many business units that work together and not everyone knows everyone. It makes it easier for them to find a fact checker if the job role is a plain "fact checker" instead of something like Senior Medical Editor who may also be a fact checker. But not all Medical Editors are fact checkers. Unfortunately, this new feature seems to only show primary role.

While this new feature won't cause us any problems, it's kind of "meh" IMO. What concerns me is with the painful latency and general slowness of Workfront, will this make the user popup even slower?

What would REALLY help is if we could choose the user fields to display via a setting. Especially helpful would be the use of a custom field.

[Chris_Thygersen]

I agree that the systems Admin should have the choice of showing the Job role OR User title OR email address and that the Job Role does not also match there working title. I do like the slack idea...When you click on a users name it uses a right hand pop out (like the Open summary in Workfront) to view the users Information.

[Heather_Kulbacki]

My vote would be for showing photos, as Skye mentioned most of our users don't have a role so that wouldn't be helpful in our instance. Also the roles we have do not always match titles and could be confusing to those less familiar with what roles are.

[RandyRoberts]

I think if admins could choose the display field, that would be the most flexible solution. Even if it were one field, we could create a concatenated field that would aggregate everything we wanted to show. Then each customer could show what matters most to them in their unique situation. Win, win.

I think Workfront was founded on the principle of customisation and that was the main feature for our purchase decision. This would continue that tradition.

[FrancesDurhamEvans]

Thank you for calling this out, @Skye Hansen‚ . As @Doug Den Hoed‚ suggested, it would be most ideal to have the option to enable or disable the feature globally within the instance. And, if enabled, to be able to choose which user element to reveal that aligns best with instance governance and organizational privacy and security.

[RandyRoberts]

Having the option to customise your own instance seems to be the old Workfront way. The new Workfront way is to force features on us that we don't want or use.

[SarahWilkersonCA]

Showing the job role for free/reviewers is not helpful at all. We bucket all of the marketing folks into 3 groups based on the approval levels...which doesn't have much to do with their title. It will actually cause an issue if this is seen outside of our internal group. If we must show something, the Title is more appropriate than the role. Plus many people have multiple roles. I would want this feature to be able to turn on/off by the system admin.