Provide your Review & Approve (ProofHQ) feedback to the Workfront UX Team!

[NateBa]

Hey there Community friends! Our internal UX Team over Workfront's Proofing tool would love some feedback on the work they're doing. @Skylar Sanford will be dropping in to do a LIVE Q&A on this thread on Tuesday, August 1st at 10:00 am MST. Skylar is a User Experience Designer here at Workfront over Proofing inside of Workfront. He is new to the Community and is excited to be engaging with you in understanding better your feedback with new releases, your vision of the future of proofing. Over the next few days, we'd love it if you would provide your thoughts, ideas, and responses to the following questions: As we are in full sprint to make proofing inside of Workfront behave like Review & Approve (ProofHQ), we are aware a good portion of you are still not using proofing inside workfront until it works more like Review & Approve (ProofHQ). So I want to ask what specific missing functionality are holding you back. What's been your experience with the new Reporting on Proof Status? Were you aware that you could report on Proof Status? How do you like the new Proof Approvals in My Work? Please leave your questions, ideas, and feedback in the comments below. Once the Q&A is over we'll close the thread. We'll allow Skylar and his team time to process what they learn, and I'll definitely be inviting them back again to chat with us. Please get your questions and feedback in early so Skylar and his team can prepare the best responses possible over the next few days. If this goes well, we'd like to consider making Q&As like this a regular experience inside the community involving other teams and departments. Thanks for all you do to make the Community an awesome place. -Nate Nate Bagley Community Manager Workfront natebagley@workfront.com | 801.477.9712

[skylarsanford]

Thanks, @Nate Bagley ! Excited to see you all on Tuesday! Skylar Sanford User Experience Designer Workfront

[sydneyp50459827]

Hey Nate, I'm looking forward to this Q&A about ProofHQ. We (Diversified Communications" upgraded to ProofHQ Premium at the beginning of the year but we were very disappointed in the product, so we decided to revert back to our previous document approval process. As we are in full sprint to make proofing inside of Workfront behave like Review & Approve (ProofHQ), we are aware a good portion of you are still not using proofing inside workfront until it works more like Review & Approve (ProofHQ). So I want to ask what specific missing functionality are holding you back. We are using ProofHQ inside of Workfront and this is how we always want to use it! That said, we are not using the "Advance Proofing Options" because of the lack of integration with Workfront. Instead, we are using Document Approvals when our designers (worker licenses) have a proof ready for our clients (reviewer licenses) to Review & Approve. This process is seamless and our clients see the document approval in multiple places - their my updates page, their notification area, their outlook email & their custom dashboard. It's great to hear that visibility of proofs is being addressed in 2017.2, but until the two systems are truly integrated, we are sticking to our document approval process. We purchased Workfront because it's a fully integrated system and for the most part, we love the product, but anything that detracts from this is simply a step backwards for us. I've provided some additional feedback below that we sent to our ProofHQ support person back when we first upgraded to ProofHQ Premium.(some of the concerns might be solved for, but I think it's still valuable input) What's been your experience with the new Reporting on Proof Status? Were you aware that you could report on Proof Status? Are you referring to the proof approval report? I'm not able to report on the status from what I can see, but maybe there's a different report I'm not aware of? I've been testing Proof Approval and Document Approval reports in the sandbox - both could be better, but I can tell Workfront is making some progress here. The Proof Approval Report would be more helpful if it had fields like: Project Name - I used text mode to get this Deadline - right now this functionality is essentially pointless. Name of user(s) who has a proof pending approval # of days in current status - especially if in Pending status How do you like the new Proof Approvals in My Work? This is a step in the right direction. Workfront and ProofHQ need to be completely integrated systems before we will consider using the advanced proofing options available with ProofHQ Premium. I hope this is helpful input and not too harsh! I really do love Workfront and the Community and I'm looking forward to this Q&A and hopeful for the future of ProofHQ! Thanks, Nate! Additional Feedback Sent to ProofHQ Support Person Overall, we've been disappointed by the upgrade. I'm not sure if it's because we don't fully understand how to make it work for us yet (the training materials on the WF education site have felt a bit pieced together, and not as comprehensive as what we've come to expect from the other training videos), but overall, the functionality has not been as expected. We're using PHQ as an integrated WF customer, and right now its feeling anything but integrated. Instead, it seems like we now have two entirely separate product experiences with very little enhanced functionality and more questions/frustration by our users… Critical issues that we're seeing: The proof recipient is unable to easily get back to the project when they receive a proof that is sent via the advanced proofing options. Our internal clients (the proof recipients) are sent a high volume of proofs each day, and without being able to click into the project details of the actual project, they are reviewing these proofs blind. Right now they are spending a lot of time searching for the project that the proof belongs to, which a lot less efficient compared to our pervious document approval process. Do you have any advice for how we can make this easier for them? And is there a way to add that link to "see it in WF" back into the proof notification email? (If this is an unresolvable issue, we might need to revert back to the more basic PHQ) The proof recipient doesn't get the same type of visual reminders within WF on the active proofs they need to review. They aren't getting the document approval notifications on the top of their "updates" page (review level users) or in their approvals tab (work level users), and surprisingly, it seems like we no longer have a way to pull document approvals into their reports/dashboards. Without this, they are forced to rely on email notifications only, which is a HUGE step back for us. Is that correct that we can no longer create reports on proofs / documents? We want all of our WF users to be able to do everything they need to do within WF. (If this is an unresolvable issue, we might need to revert back to the more basic PHQ) The default email alerts aren't "sticking". We manually disabled the email notifications (daily, all comments, etc) for all users, but some are resetting to daily digest when proofs a generated, and those users are becoming frustrated with the volume of email they are getting. (Also, not sure if it's possible, but it would be great to have a way to bulk edit settings like this I am unable to edit who on my team has a PHQ license without contacting support. (I can see the check box on the user's profile to give them proofing access, but I'm unable to check it on/off, even though I am a system admin) Additional feedback: It would be great if there was a way to globally edit the automatic subject line for all proofs set. We're finding that the current language isn't as strong or intuitive as what it was before, but given our proofing volumes- manually editing it each time just isn't an option. It would be great if non PHQ license holders could be set as proof moderators. We often have a team of 5+ internal clients reviewing proofs, and I'd love to be able to allow our primary decision maker to edit their teams comments, as a way to better control the proof feedback. Not to mention, the roles within PHQ are really confusing which is back to my point of the language in PHQ standalone not aligning with the language in WF. In additional to being able to report on proofs, it would be great to be able to report on metrics like: the date/time that feedback is due, number of versions that have been created, the amount of time it takes to get feedback back, etc. While I'm not a fan of having to leave WF to see anything project related, if I have to- I'd like to be able to see the proof metrics on the PHQ dashboard by individual proof owner, as well as for a group or team of proof owners It would be great if the person who generates the proof were more clearly labeled the proof owner, and only that, as its confusing for everyone when one of our designers (the person making and sending the proof) is also labeled a reviewer or approver, like our internal clients would be Finally, in your training materials, I found myself watching and re-watching a basic integrated customer focused PHQ premium video, along with two PHS premium videos that seemed like they were created for a more standalone proofing customer. (I.e. it's my understanding that labels and folders don't apply to an integrated user, so learning about those features got me even more confused). I'm not sure what kind of feedback you've been getting from other customers, but I feel like an "Everything you need to know as an integrated user and System Admin before starting with PHQ premium" type training video would be a great addition.

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Sydney Peterson
Diversified Communications, Inc.
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Original Message:
Sent: 07-27-2017 12:44
From: Nate Bagley
Subject: Provide your Review & Approve (ProofHQ) feedback to the Workfront UX Team!

Hey there Community friends!

Our internal UX Team over Workfront's Proofing tool would love some feedback on the work they're doing. @Skylar Sanford will be dropping in to do a LIVE Q&A on this thread on Tuesday, August 1st at 10:00 ...

[OndinaSt]

Sydney, thank you for the comprehensive summary - I agree with you on all points! We've been using PHQ for over a year and are mid-launch with WF so are now looking at WF Doc Approval vs PHQ Approval for our creative projects. I expect we will stick with the PHQ process since we can see the workflow and easily set deadlines among other things. However, a big sticking point for me is the lack of reporting on proof status/decisions in WF (and PHQ). The WF Proof Approval report makes no sense since it only tells me who the approvers are but not their decision nor the overall proof status (changes required, approved, etc) - I have to go to each proofed document to see this information. The Document Version Status ID field available in the report is changing when decisions are made but I can't see what the ID means - I've tried changing to 'name' but no luck and the API site is even more confusing since any proofing info is under the Document Approval, etc sections. When we were looking at WF Doc Approvals, I am able to see all of the approvers and their decision ("pending" showed as "new" though). This is what we need it to show on a Proof report. The Document Approval report isn't able to show the overall status of the document approval - I couldn't figure out a way to show if the approval itself was still pending, or if all approvers had made their decision. We may use Doc Approvals for non-creative approvals so this is important to figure out. We also looked at the new WF Approval Process/Path. However, when just 1 person rejected it then it completely stopped the process. It would be great if the PHQ approval process (multiple reviewers at the same time and worst case decision is the overall status) could be brought into the WF Approval process. Regarding the My Work area, we've noticed that it is taking quite some time for Proofs to show. It took 10 minutes yesterday for 1 proof; in addition to the lengthy rendering time we're seeing the past couple of weeks. Lastly, to avoid confusion, it would be helpful if the Approvals section that shows in the right rail of a document could be hidden/turned off at the admin level. Since we will probably use the PHQ approval process we are expecting confusion from our users when they see the Approvals section is blank. All that said, great progress has been made. I'm looking forward to the discussion later this morning to see how other users are utilizing the integration. Thanks, Ondina Ondina Sturges Everyday Health Inc

[BMO-bvs]

We are also using proofing inside Workfront and document approvals. To be honest, I find the two separate approval choices and ProofHQ in general confusing so I have only done high level investigation into using PHQ advanced proofing. I agree with everything Sydney mentions. Additionally for us, it's the responsibility of our designers to upload documents and assign approvers so the process to either create a proof workflow or even to attach a template is way too complex: There are too many options, the interface is confusing and the language differs from what they're already used to in Workfront. We would love to be able to use approval templates -- primarily as a way to simplify the task list and set deadlines that trigger (hopefully clean, user-friendly and non-PHQ-branded) notifications. We have over 350 potential approvers. This means approval workflow templates cannot be user-based, as they currently are. We need to be able to create role-based templates. Designers need one simple way to quickly attach an approval template. No more options, no more text boxes, settings, messages etc., just simply attach an approval template. The template should then automatically slot in the various approvers based on their roles matching those from the approval template. If multiple people on the project share a role, a way to select the proper approver. Thanks. Barbara Sedlack BMO Financial Group

[SkyeHa]

As we are in full sprint to make proofing inside of Workfront behave like Review & Approve (ProofHQ), we are aware a good portion of you are still not using proofing inside workfront until it works more like Review & Approve (ProofHQ). So I want to ask what specific missing functionality are holding you back. What's been your experience with the new Reporting on Proof Status? Were you aware that you could report on Proof Status? How do you like the new Proof Approvals in My Work? Please leave your questions, ideas, and feedback in the comments below. 1) We're not using advanced proofing features because of the way our workflow is set up. * Our review cycle involves a number of stages and reviews are assigned out to specific people who are not the same for every proof. * Once each stage review is completed, the PM needs to have discretion on whether or not to re-send a proof back to an earlier stage and right now, ProofHQ is making this determination automatically. * Our designers generate the proof when they load the document, in order to save time. The doc approval is then set up by the PM. The designers have no role in the review assignment process so tying the reviewer paths to the generation of the proof is a non-starter for us. 2) We don't use advanced proofing features, so I haven't tested this feature. We're using doc approvals reporting to track our proof statuses. 3) This is a bit confusing for me. I actually sent email to my CSM asking for more info about this. Seems like right now only people who are tagged as "Reviewers and Approvers" can see the approvals in My Work. So if someone is just tagged as a Reviewer then how are you planning to have them manage this Work? Or is it not considered Work? -skye

[Richard__Carlson]

Permission Profiles between WF and PHQ Is there any current plan to have parity between permission profiles in PHQ and WF? When we had PHQ standalone we had previously taken the time to create a bunch of functional profiles in PHQ and these do not show up in WF. Additionally, there is zero indication what the profiles do in WF. I learned the hard way that "Supervisor" has higher privileges than "Manager" - on what planet does that make sense? Couldn't there be a way to incorporate a little bit of help text to explain the differences in the account setup screen? General Slowness / Proof upload errors Our graphic artists sometimes will encounter errors when uploading proofs to WF, the error is pretty non-descriptive, something like "Proofing Error, please try again". Number one, this gives no indication what went wrong. Number two, we've found it to not always be accurate, if we wait 10 seconds and refresh the screen the proof appears ok. Then randomly we will come back to it and it will have an error message again, even after the new file has been uploaded and the new proof generated. Sometimes the artist will then delete the proof they just uploaded and somehow, through some disconnect magic, they deleted a proof that had comments and markups on it. Next, inevitably a proof reviewer will try to look at the document and notice that all of their comments are gone and they will panic. At that point I'm alerted to the situation and I have to go into PHQ standalone and restore the file and add the previous version back to the proof. Workfront Proofing Emails We assign project managers tasks in WF to manage approvals for their projects, this can be a very complicated and layered process and sometimes only the PMs know who to route a proof to. I wish the proofing emails that are generated would direct users to WF instead of PHQ. My reasoning is that they open the email and click the link to view the proof and it takes them directly to PHQ. This seems fine except after their proof markups they need to mark their task as done in WF and there's no obvious way to associate the proof they just looked at with a WF project. If the email brought them to WF when they are done marking up the proof and close PHQ they will be looking at the project in WF and they can easily mark their task as being done. This might seem like a silly problem but we have a lot of users who are not great with technology in general and we also have people that don't use WF all day. In their eyes they did their job by reviewing the proof. Reporting on PHQ metrics I would like the ability to report on PHQ metrics, the most important one to me is "how long does it take a user / team to review a proof". Our graphic department will prepare and distribute a proof to a team for their review. The reviewers will take 2 weeks to review the proof (which sometimes is way too long) and then the project is back with us and it's now a rush. This happens over and over and I don't think we are doing a good enough job in recognizing how much time and money this breakdown is costing us. How to I present this data to my boss? Finger pointing and accusing is not helpful, but reports and graphs tell the whole story. I would love to have something that says "Team A / Employee 234564, on average, takes 2 weeks to review proofs. The company average is 2 days" Richard Carlson Behr Process Corporation

[emilyp7772345]

As we are in full sprint to make proofing inside of Workfront behave like Review & Approve (ProofHQ), we are aware a good portion of you are still not using proofing inside workfront until it works more like Review & Approve (ProofHQ). So I want to ask what specific missing functionality are holding you back. I'm a bit late to the party on this, but would love more of the ProofHQ functionality. We currently use the Advanced Proofing Options > Automated Workflow to upload our proofs, but still have to log in to ProofHQ directly when uploading multiple file types of the same proof (depending on production flow, some require EPS as well.) I'm hoping this means you'll be adding that functionality? What's been your experience with the new Reporting on Proof Status? Were you aware that you could report on Proof Status? I am currently unaware of this feature. Are you saying it would be possible to generate reports within Workfront based on ProofHQ proof status? We've had to implement a variety of work arounds to maintain our turnaround time based on how we've built out Workfront for our usage. Having a way to generate a report for proofs requiring changes would be ideal, as we have a 15 hr "open" time and a four hour turn for alterations. How do you like the new Proof Approvals in My Work? This new feature doesn't really apply for our internal production, however I can reach out to the recipients and get their opinion on it. I think our use case is a bit different, we do high quantity proofs for users outside of Workfront with a very fast turn time. Is there any chance to talk about individual use cases during the Q & A? Emily Pandzik Staples, Inc.

[skylarsanford]

Hello awesome Community ! Welcome to the Review and Approval LIVE Q&A! I'm stoked to be here! and wow looks like a bunch of you have responded to my first questions, thank you so much! I will be on here for the next 60 minutes chatting with you. Even if you just want to say hello, please, say hello! Before we start I just wanted to let you know that I am here to LISTEN to you guys! You amazing people are what drives me and this product. My aim is to better understand your concerns and idea. I'll warn you now I am not Tech Support, I am a User Experience Designer working to make the product better with each release. If you have any issues, or support related questions, please forward them to customercare@workfront.com. I will do my best to respond to each of you and if I don't right now, I will definitely be following up with each of you throughout the week and beyond. I may flip the tables and ask a some questions to you all, so feel free to respond to them as well. So lets do this! Ask or express away! Skylar Sanford Workfront

[skylarsanford]

I'm responding now to many of your concerns around Reporting Proof Status. Just yesterday, we demo'd to our Product Leadership some additions to that area that I think you will all like. Here's a new question for you all: How often, if any are you using Custom Fields in your Proof creation flow. Is it something you find useful? Is it something that could be better? Skylar Sanford Workfront

[skylarsanford]

@Sydney Peterson Thanks for this meaty response. I have logged your response and shared it with my Product Manager yesterday and it has started a good conversation. Your response, along with several others, is making me shift my focus a bit more around visiblity in proofing AND reporting as well. We have enhanced the ability to report on proof status. This will be something that will be launched in the very next release. Sydney, I would love to set up a time for me to show you more directly what we have been working on and get your feedback. If you're interested, please Direct Message me and we'll set up a time. I would love to get your feedback! Skylar Sanford Workfront

[emilyp7772345]

Hi Skyler, When you say custom fields, you mean the automated workflow and our templates within? If so, we use that with all proofs. We would love to have the requestor email autopopulate within the send email section. Is that along the lines of what you're asking about? Emily Pandzik Staples, Inc.

[skylarsanford]

Thanks for your response. Yes, the My Work area with approvals really does need some love. As we are wrapping up more critical features with the next release, the My Work Approvals is somewhere we have discussed some possible changes for a better experience. Your comment about hiding the approval section for Admin was particularly insightful. I would love to talk to you more directly around that and other areas so I can better understand your workflows. Would you be interested in having a 1-on-1 in the coming days to get your feedback? Skylar Sanford Workfront

[Richard__Carlson]

I think he means custom fields in PHQ, but I could be wrong PHQ -> account settings -> custom fields tab I don't know how it works, but I found this help article

[skylarsanford]

Thanks, @Richard Carlson , @Emily Pandzik I was speaking of Custom Fields inside of PHQ. If you are using proofing inside of Workfront you may not be aware that it exists, because simply it doesn't exist inside of Workfront....yet. To ask it in a different way, are custom fields something you would like (or need) to see inside or Workfront? Skylar Sanford Workfront

[emilyp7772345]

I scrolled through the article that Richard linked to earlier in the thread (Thanks for that, btw!), but it doesn't appear to be something we would use. Most of our communication either goes in the body of the notification email, within Update Status or in the comments on the proof. Of course, I could wake up in the middle of the night with a Eureka for that, but off hand I don't think so. Emily Pandzik Staples, Inc.

[skylarsanford]

@Barbara Sedlack Thanks for your golden feedback! The current experience of creating proof workflows is... a messy endeavor to say the least. It's quite clunky. For the past 8+ months, my team has been building a completely refreshed look and experience for this to make it more understandable and streamlined. Step 2, for me, is what you are talking about. Making the flow for designers to attached template workflows only a couple clicks. Not a couple dozen. Especially with teams like yours where your approval process seems rather consistent, the value of this would be hours saved each week. Barbara, I would be very interested in talking to you more directly about your team's process. And gain some more insight from you to shape our shortterm road map to meet the needs of teams like yours. Direct Message me if this is something you would be interested in doing ans we'll set something up. thanks! Skylar Sanford Workfront

[skylarsanford]

Okay, no worries. But regarding your comments around auto-generated email text, that makes complete sense to me. I will be bringing this up with my Product Manager today. Please see the attached image to double check we're talking about the same email section: Skylar Sanford Workfront

[Richard__Carlson]

@Skyler Hansen I would like to see further development of reporting ability regarding PHQ from within WF Richard Carlson Behr Process Corporation

[skylarsanford]

Thanks, @Richard Carlson I would love to hear more specifics around how we could develop that can better solve your flows and processes. But it seems like the overall general feedback is for more visibility and data around the approval reporting. Thanks for your comments! Skylar Sanford Workfront

[sydneyp50459827]

Responding to @Barbara Sedlack "We are also using proofing inside Workfront and document approvals. To be honest, I find the two separate approval choices and ProofHQ in general confusing so I have only done high level investigation into using PHQ advanced proofing." I agree! We did a deeper dive into PHQ Standalone and Advanced Proofing Options earlier this year, as mentioned in my previous post. When we realized we might have made a mistake by upgrading to PHQ Premium all together, I've kind of gone on pretending ProofHQ Premium doesn't exist. Kinda..sad! :( "I agree with everything Sydney mentions. Additionally for us, it's the responsibility of our designers to upload documents and assign approvers so the process to either create a proof workflow or even to attach a template is way too complex: There are too many options, the interface is confusing and the language differs from what they're already used to in Workfront." Our designers also upload documents and assign approvers. The last thing we want to do is crush their creative spirit with too many clicks, messages, settings, drop-downs, etc. It's okay if I, on the admin side, have to do a little more of this to set my team up for success, but I certainly don't want the responsibility to fall on our designers. I would also like to see consistent language, I'm all for setting up templated anything in Workfront instead of a one-off approach! My job essentially is Workfront....all day, every day. I'm constantly looking at how we're using the WHOLE system & reflecting on myself how we can use it better. I don't want ProofHQ Premium to be a missed opportunity but, @Skylar Sanford - I do feel better having participated in this Q&A - at least knowing how hard your team is working to improve the experience. I'm so excited to hear more about what the future of ProofHQ will look like! Sydney Peterson Diversified Communications, Inc.