Feedback request - would this tool help you as an admin to organize spaces @creation or for tidying

[Andrew van Ingen {ServiceRocket}]

I myself have managed and maintained an intranet for 10 years and had quite some challenges with keeping spaces organized.

I am now in a market research role and was asked to find feedback for "Birdview", which is free.  https://marketplace.atlassian.com/apps/1223906/birdview-for-confluence-preview?tab=overview&hosting=cloud

Basically, it is a way to visualize Confluence structure in a 'mindmap' format, and organize content with drag and drop. I was wondering if you would see a use-case for this in your line of work.

Your thoughts are valuable because I believe it is helpful to hear from different people how this app could be used and what jobs need to be done.

Would you be willing to check it out and let me know your thoughts?

Best,

Andrew

[Collista Lewingdon]

Good morning. From a brief overview of the app I do not believe it would be useful to my users. It does not appear to be very user friendly in regards to documentation. 

[Andrew van Ingen {ServiceRocket}]

Thank you. What are the jobs your users need to do? Do you have a process in place for giving 'lost' pages a correct 'home'?

[Andrew van Ingen {ServiceRocket}]

Are there stakeholders in your company who like to have a view of the current 'status' of the available content?

[Collista Lewingdon]

We currently use the most recently updated feature in Confluence to view recently updated content and we encourage users to archive pages that are no longer valid. The left side bar view with the items categorized under parent pages is a very clean view. Things that don't have a parent page goes under a parent page called miscellaneous. The two sets of graphs I have seen you display for this honestly make it very convoluted. 

[Andrew van Ingen {ServiceRocket}]

This is the graph of the current product. You can see the structure (such as 'orphans') and rearrange pages with drag and drop (to a miscellaneous page for example).

The 'philosophy' is that you can quickly see ancestors and descendants of many pages and have an overview of all the pages that are in the space. Then you might discover redundancy or that a certain branch would fit better elsewhere.

An other option is that it helps beforehand - before filling the space - to 'mindmap' the structure. Any thoughts on that?

Thanks!

[Jon Booth]

I think what I find is that the heirachical nature of confluence doesn't work well for the informational design we need - instead I'd like to be able to view and find things  more like a web of related content, either by in-page links, tags or some other clever way.

Then visualizing this web and allowing you to hover over and see a synopsis or in-line view of the page in question could be a really powerful tool, not just for our content creators but everyone who uses our spaces.

[Andrew van Ingen {ServiceRocket}]

Sort of like a graph?

[Andrew van Ingen {ServiceRocket}]

@Jon Booth would a graph like the one above meet your needs?

[Jon Booth]

@Andrew van Ingen {ServiceRocket} , yeah, it would have to be a multi-connected graph.  I guess directional - or at least it might be useful to see the direction of the edges.

I was thinking more on this, you'd ideally weight it by page views or the number of times linkes are followed or the time since the last edit or some other clever critera to help cluster and arrange and highlight areas of interest.

This is really speculation though; it would definately be interesting to see, how useful it would actually end up being and for what kind of users, I'm not sure. 

I'm also not sure if this is the most effective way of solving the problem, I suspect many organisations suffer (everywhere I've ever worked) whereby the organisation of their wiki is sub-optimal.

[Andrew van Ingen {ServiceRocket}]

@Jon Booth thank you for sharing this idea.
And I understand it is speculation. I will try and see if I can find more "buy-in".

I really like the 'weighing' aspect. Would you 'translate' the weight into bigger 'clouds' for the page?

[Andrew van Ingen {ServiceRocket}]

@Jon Booth thank you.

I wrote an other reply but it seems lost.

I am aware it is speculative. I will try to find more "buy-in" and hear more feedback.

I really like your idea of the weight. Would you make the 'clouds' of those pages bigger? or thicken the line towards that page? (sort of like a highway vs mini-path)

[Jon Booth]

I'm not sure how to weight things, I was thinking for clustering or bigger elements like a word-map, or thicker/emphasised lines with colouring, I'm not really sure.

I think you'd have to do mock-ups and user test the whole concept.

[Jon Booth]

Another idea; maybe you could use this view also to serve search results, with clustering aroind result pages that match...

Heaps of possibilities

[Andrew van Ingen {ServiceRocket}]

Interesting idea. Definitely something to investigate.