Help Desk Portal is quite important application. It allows our customers to interact with us. Also it allows customers of our customers to interact with our customers (weird assertion, but it's true :). We've collected quite many requests for Help Desk Portal improvements and finally decided to push it forward.

Here is the first mockup of the home page. It is still a work in progress, so comments/changes/advices are welcome.

There are some ideas behind the Help Desk Portal re-design:

• When someone has a problem, he should be able to find existing solution easily (if any). If there is no solution, it should be straightforward how to post a request
• Ideas and Issues should be separated. They have quite different flows and expectation. If someone post an issue it should be resolved quickly. Idea can live in the backlog for years.
• People may use search or tags to find relevant ideas and requests.

The next step may be to add more social networking into Help Desk Portal (self-service is a great thing if you can encourage other customers to provide solutions and answer the questions). However this is just an idea so far.

We are redesigning comments to make them more usable. Redesign includes clear formatting and some functional improvements. Current comments list has several problems as you see:

Here is the list of ideas:

• Currently to add a comment user should click add link and the form appears on the bottom of the list. The add link will be removed and comment form will be always visible.
• Currently when user clicks Edit, the comment content loaded into rich editor in the bottom of the list (frustrating!). In new design it will be almost like inline edit with no focus loss.
• It will be impossible to use custom styles in comments. In some cases comments list becomes a mess, so just clean HTML messages will be saved and all other stuff removed.
• Edit and Delete links should be there, but these actions are quite rare. To reduce quantity of visual elements, these links will be hidden by default and visible on mouse hover only.
• It is definitely better to see something like "comment added 2 days ago" than "comment added 12-12-2009"
• Comments from customers will be highlighted in the list to make them quickly identifiable.
• More space will be added between comments.

Lists in v.3.0 was a hot topic during today's meeting. It seems we will replace all lists in v.3.0 (such as User Stories, Bugs, Requests, etc) with lists based on the Custom Reports functionality. It will be possible to create custom lists (same way as a custom report) and to include these lists into the Main menu. For example, you may create Current Iteration Stories list or Open Stories list and include them into Planning section of the Project menu.

The other interesting idea discussed, was to provide List and Grid modes. You will be able to group by Iteration in the user stories list and see items as a grid, where each iteration is a column. It may be possible to change iteration using drag and drop. It can potentially replace Iteration Plan section completely. There are many useful applications of such Grid.

Current Custom Reports should be improved to provide great user experience.

• Filters. It should be easy to add and change filters in the list, so filters should be accessible in one click.
• Renderers and Colors. People should be able to set custom colors and maybe even styles to list items. For example, I want to mark all rows red for blocking bugs or gray for completed user stories. These will be a custom settings.
• Batch actions. It will be possible to change all properties for selected stories in several clicks. For example, I may select 10 stories, click Batch action, select new Iteration, new Priority, new Assignment and save all these changes.

Today we've discussed navigation problems in TargetProcess and all agreed that we have four major issues:

1. Similar labels in menu (for example, Reports inside a project area and Custom Reports in top menu).
2. Too many links in the header (for example, in Project -> Planning area there are 31 links to click).
3. Menu structure and how to get into required place (why Tags Board is in the Dashboard section?).
4. It is not clear whether we are inside a project or outside.

We've come up to several improvements that may resolve the problems.

First, we agreed that there were two major different areas: inside and outside of a project. If a user is inside the project, he focuses on project's tasks and will likely not go to Admin or Projects list. So we decided to separate global menu and project menu. It means that inside the project user will not see the top level menu, but just Back to Home link. Also there is no company logo and company name in the project area. It may look like that (just a mockup, not sure about final design):

Benefits? Sure, there are plenty!

1. 17 links instead of 31 and more air in the menu.
2. No frustration where to click.
3. Clear sign that we are in the project area (large gray project name).

There is only one downside - one extra click if you need to change settings in Admin, check custom reports, etc. if you are inside a project. Quite rare operations to sacrifice simplicity.