I'm on the Customer Advocacy team as the Lead for Desktop. Our team is part of Esri Support Services and is dedicated to collecting customer feedback and communicating that feedback to Product teams. Our team covers Apps, ArcGIS Online, Desktop, Enterprise, and Geodata. The ArcGIS Ideas site is an important feedback channel for us.
I wanted to take a couple of minutes to share my excitement about progress we're making on Ideas in the ArcGIS Desktop space. First, here’s a little bit of background on what happens after you’ve submitted your idea.
Once your idea is up on the Ideas site, you'll notice that it has a status of New. Feel free to refer to Submitting a New Idea for more details. This quick post isn't to repeat what can already be found in the online help documents. Be sure to categorize your idea appropriately and give it some good tags that will help others find your great idea. At this point the idea gets reviewed by the Customer Advocacy team. We don't dig in super deeply, we make sure that it isn't a duplicate of an idea that already exists and we double-check those categories and tags that you diligently included. If all looks good, we simply mark the idea as Reviewed. That's what you see on your side. We also check to see if we have a similar request already logged through our Support system. This would likely be in the form of an Enhancement Request. If so, we make sure that the idea is linked with the Enhancement Request. By doing this, we can get a clearer picture of Customer demand for the functionality.
As time goes by, ideas get up votes, down votes and comments from the user community. Advocacy Leads frequently monitor the site, and usually on a monthly basis report on trends to our respective Product teams. Ideas may be discussed because they have a high overall score. But if that were the only criteria, as it takes time to accumulate a high score, relatively new ideas wouldn’t make it into the discussion. So we also look at things like how fast an idea’s score is growing – how many up votes this month? – how many up votes this year? Sometimes we also see an idea collect a wide variety of user stories. It may not have an incredibly high score, or even be growing as fast as other ideas. But what if, out of 15 up votes, the community has provided 15 unique and compelling user stories in the comments? Those user stories may reveal that the functionality could be used across a number of different industries, meaning that implementing the idea would have a greater impact than something that is a niche use. This is a really good reason to not only vote for ideas that you’d like to see, but also provide your user story in the comments!
I think that does a pretty good job laying down the background. Now for what I really wanted to share - we've been moving a lot of ideas forward in the Desktop space recently. Ideas move from Reviewed to Under Consideration or In Product Plan. Under Consideration means we are actively considering and researching this Idea. In Product Plan means that we have scheduled the Idea for inclusion in a future release. Take a look at Statuses for ArcGIS Ideas to understand the finer details about what a status actually means. As we review just how much movement we've made on the ideas below, keep in mind that this is just in the Desktop space and there is a lot of progress being made across other products and technologies as well!
In the past month, here is a snapshot of status updates.
15 Desktop ideas have been moved from New or Reviewed to Under Consideration:
13 Desktop ideas have been moved to In Product Plan:
As we go, ideas that are In Product Plan will graduate to Implemented, many ideas that are Under Consideration will move to In Product Plan, and as you continue to enthusiastically submit more great ideas, the cycle will continue. I hope that sharing these updates is insightful. I wanted to thank you for participating in the process and let you know that we’re listening!
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