UX: Adding people to a group
The most pressing UX problem we've discovered from our user testing over the past couple weeks is the process for adding people to your group.
To my mind, this is split into two parts:
- the group settings for access/permissions/privacy are confusing and restrictive;
- and, the invitation form is overly ambitious and under designed, so the end result is a confusing form that we've watched multiple users fail to navigate.
The devs are well underway on a much improved group settings form, which will be live in the next few days. This includes a change which will mean new groups will start with "Anyone can ask to join" enabled by default - one component of making groups easier to access.
Simplifying the invitation form
There are lots of jobs we want to do with this form. In order of priority:
- (must have) user types email address, presses enter or clicks submit, invitation is sent
- (must have) it's easy to bring in multiple people
- (nice to have) it's easy to select people without knowing their email address, e.g. by providing a list of Loomio users that share a group with you, or by integrating with your email address book
- (nice to have) add a custom message to explain why people should join the group
Right now, we're focussed on fixing the very pressing UX problem of the first 2 bullet points, and building up from there.
Update: I shared one design, got some feedback, and have now updated a second design here:
I had a look at how Slack handles invitations...
...then went through a few loops and got to this iteration of the invite people form:
...which lets you add a custom message:
And if you are inviting someone to a subgroup:
...you just click to add parent members:
Additionally, we're exploring the idea of adding a "team sharing link", which will work like Google Doc's "anyone with link" setting:
(That is a question we'll look at more deeply in the next week or two though.)
We're planning to build it and run a couple of user tests ASAP.
I'm keen to hear how you respond to these mockups before we build anything - does it look to you like an improvement on the current form?
James Kiesel Thu 5 Nov 2015 5:35AM
I personally think this really needs multi-select, and sending out all the invites at the same time. I was imagining taking a list of emails in a spreadsheet and inviting people one by one (ick), as opposed to copy-pasting them into a field (yay!)
Yeah it's do-able with the shareable link but I'd much rather be able to bulk invite people with copy-paste too... especially given that most of the time we'll be wanting to invite multiple (often many) people, since this is part of the 'start a group' workflow.
Alanna Irving Thu 5 Nov 2015 7:42PM
Why is this posted in Contributors and not the general Loomio Community group? Surely this is an ideal discussion for getting general user feedback?
Overall I think it looks like a good improvement. The one minor thing I would change is that the confirmation message that the person has been invited should appear in the box where the user is focused, not in the bottom corner of the screen. It's likely people won't notice it, and in the box they're looking at, it just looks like their data has disappeared. It should say something like "1 User invited! Invite more?" so it's clear why that same input field is still in focus.
Richard D. Bartlett Thu 5 Nov 2015 8:56PM
@jameskiesel I have a hunch (which I'm not sure how to test) that having a user share an access link with their team is likely to be significantly more successful than having Loomio send out invitation emails.
Yesterday I invited three (high profile) people to a test group and none of them received their email. I don't know which point in the chain failed, but it was embarrassing and deflated a lot of the initial energy for trying Loomio.
Then I switched the group settings to 'anyone can ask to join', shared the group link, and told the three of them that they could come in that way. When the first person arrived, he saw that the group was publicly listed and immediately asked me to switch it to private. Wompf.
The 4 of us had already established communication in an email thread. I would have vastly preferred to just send a link along in that email thread and know that everyone could easily get in, the way I can with Doodle and Google Docs.
I agree we want a good system for inviting multiple people, I just haven't seen a great design for Loomio yet.
From my research this week, Google Inbox has probably the best bulk invite system I've seen (supports names and emails, validates emails as soon as they are entered, plays nice with keyboard, works equally well for 1 or 100 people). The only hesitation in following that UX is that we don't have the UI element for it in Loomio yet (in Material design terms they call that element "chips").
Robert Guthrie Sun 8 Nov 2015 6:07AM
aside: I think we'll need to be able to generate and cancel team links. Could sit with "pending invitations".
Richard D. Bartlett Tue 10 Nov 2015 11:45PM
Ok I have done some more research and design, keen to push this along ASAP.
I had a look at how Slack handles invitations...
...then went through a few loops and got to this iteration of the invite people form:
...which lets you add a custom message:
And if you are inviting someone to a subgroup:
...you just click to add parent members:
What I like about this: all the same functionality as Beta, but with (I hope) a cleaner and more accessible UX because there are no custom UI elements in there. Everything is just normal forms and there are no tricky autocompletes.
Whachureckon?
James Kiesel Wed 11 Nov 2015 8:15AM
Whoop, love it. Wonder if first iteration can ignore the parent group stuff.
Richard D. Bartlett Wed 11 Nov 2015 7:16PM
Hey @alanna thanks for the prod, I'm moved this thread into the Loomio Community group now. It was an oversight starting it in the subgroup :)
Richard D. Bartlett Wed 11 Nov 2015 7:21PM
I just got a really informative message from someone, expressing their concern at having been added to a new group without their permission.
The way this currently works, if you and another person share a group in common, they can immediately add you to another group, i.e. you don't get a chance to accept or decline the invitation first.
This has proved to be a convenient way to administer multiple groups and subgroups, and I don't recall hearing any other complaints of abuse before today.
However I think it is reasonable to consider changing this behaviour at the same time as we are looking at rebuilding how invitations work. What do you think @robertguthrie?
Greg Cassel Wed 11 Nov 2015 7:32PM
I hope Rob does chime in, but I have a very strong opinion on your last comment @richarddbartlett adding people to social and/or political groups without their knowledge or consent is often a recipe for disaster. I've dealt with the resulting messes a number of times.
Matthew Bartlett · Thu 5 Nov 2015 12:25AM
It looks like an improvement.