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Community Tip Jar: Keeping Up With Your Users

  • 1.  Community Tip Jar: Keeping Up With Your Users

    Posted 02-24-2020 13:42
    Edited by Evan Martinez 02-24-2020 13:56
    February has come bringing colder weather and Valentine's Day where we are reminded to appreciate the special people in our lives. As a Quick Base Admin or App Builder your end users are probably just a few of the special people in your work life and this Tip Jar topic for February is all about them. 

    As a Community there are so many awesome ideas floating around and great techniques that builders come up with to help them stay connected to their end users and manage everyone that takes part in their apps it is great to see what everyone has to share. Take a quick minute and share a tip below from your experience working with your end users and managing roles and permissions in your account and apps. Now if you are eager to share your expertise this is where you can stop reading if you like and jump right into the reply box to share your own tips, scroll down to the other replies to see others tips, or keep reading to see my tip below.

    My Tip for Keeping Up With Your Users

    I'll start off with a few tips I use pretty regularly in my own apps (and used quite a bit back in my Care days) to help keep my app users organized. Sometimes the best place to start is familiarizing yourself with who is using your app today, and luckily your app's user table is a great place to start. 


    Your App's User Table

    The User table of your app serves as a current roster of all users who you have invited to the app or set specific statuses for (this can include users who you added at some point but gave a role of 'none' or changed their access to 'none'). This way you can see who is accessing your data and in what role they are in the app. In that report you can even sort those users by a few handy fields like "Last Visited" or "Access via" so you can learn more about when a user last accessed the app or if they received an invite directly or because they are part of a group you invited to the app.

    There are even some handy filters along the side that can let you narrow your search down to just users in a specific role (great for figuring out who your fellow app admins are) or finding users who have a certain status. If you haven't given them a try yet now might be a great time to get familiar with the options available to you since I've only highlighted a few.


    Identifying Users That Haven't Been Active

    For a lot of apps that grow over time their user list can grow very quickly for a few users to tens or hundreds of users. That can make user management a bit more daunting, especially as more time passes.

    One best practice is to periodically pull up your users table and for any of your users who have "Access via" the option Individual sort them based on their Last Visit day and identify your users who haven't been on (for a really active app maybe in the last 3 months or the last year for an app that doesn't get used every day). This can help you identify users who aren't actually using the app or who have left your company and could be removed. Once you have that list you can touch base with your team and see if some of these users need to be removed to help simplify managing your users and also to help keep your data secure in Quick Base by making sure users who have moved on from your team get removed. 

    To go along with this tip you might notice that your users who have "Access Via" Membership in a group don't show their last access, this is because they are using the groups permissions to access the app so it isn't tracked in the same way. If you are curious about your groups activity you would want to get in touch with the members of that group and the admin of that group to make sure it is up to date if you are seeing names that shouldn't be in your app any more. This way you can be sure you are staying up to date with who is using the app and make sure your roster doesn't get so big it is out of control. 


    I can't wait to hear your tips on how you stay connected with your users and manage the users for your app!



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    Evan Martinez
    Community Marketing Manager
    Quick Base
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  • 2.  RE: Community Tip Jar: Keeping Up With Your Users

    Posted 02-24-2020 14:24
    One thing I have struggled with is that the "Show in user pickers" option doesn't seem to work in all situations. For me we have many users that are no longer active and are even listed as denied but they are still in our old data. So there may be a record that has them in an "Assigned To" field for example because when that was active they were the user responsible for this. When that is the case that user can never be removed from your standard user picker. If you do remove them with the option I mentioned before the option gets reset on its own later, no idea of the trigger, and they are put back into the list. This is very frustrating and I have seen many older posts talking about it frustrating them too.

    Now I know that one solution to this is to have your own user picker that is filtered based on a report and an Employee table rather than just using the apps default user field and picker. However this isn't a solution I can implement right away to replace my current fields. I am slowly making these changes but just wanted to bring up something that has frustrated me in the past because I didn't know why it was happening.


  • 3.  RE: Community Tip Jar: Keeping Up With Your Users

    Posted 02-24-2020 17:15
    Thornton Melon was talking about school but it applies to Users as well.







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    Don Larson
    Paasporter
    Westlake OH
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  • 4.  RE: Community Tip Jar: Keeping Up With Your Users

    Posted 02-25-2020 10:14
    Couple times a year, I might have to present to our Sales team, who use QB the most, to show them updates we've done as a company and also the enhancements from native QB. I'll also start including QB tips in our bi-monthly marketing newsletter.

    Majority of the company knows I'm their go to person for anything QB related, so they usually reach out to me for changes or questions on what fields to report on. Another person in the company manages users accounts, but I know they go through the list and remove anyone who has not accesses our realm within the past 6 months, and will re-distribute that seat to someone who does need access.

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    Jenni Murray
    Detroit, MI
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  • 5.  RE: Community Tip Jar: Keeping Up With Your Users

    Posted 03-03-2020 09:00
    Jenni - 
    That's a great tip!  I try to do monthly updates too and you just gave me a great way of organizing that into a newletter all about Quick Base!  Thanks!

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    Wendy Haas
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  • 6.  RE: Community Tip Jar: Keeping Up With Your Users

    Posted 02-25-2020 17:20
    What if you are the admin of the group, but you can't tell who still needs access because you have no way to tell if they are using the app? Hmm..

    My best tip for staying connected to users is to actually sit next to them occasionally while they are using your app. You will learn more in fifteen minutes of doing that than you will in hours of anything else you do. You'll identify unexpected uses of your apps and gaps in your training which you can probably easily fix once you know they exist, but that you'll never hear about otherwise.

    Another trick I've found useful is to have an "announcements" table where you can put info, file attachments, training documents, FAQs, and anything else that's important to communicate to users. Stick it at the top of the homepage, and everyone will naturally see it. (You can have it show only announcements created in the last X days or the last X announcements to keep it from taking up too much valuable real estate.) Doing that has cut down my support requests by at least 90%, which is great for everyone.

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    Kat Valentine
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  • 7.  RE: Community Tip Jar: Keeping Up With Your Users

    Posted 02-26-2020 09:29
    I visit my users quite often to see what they are working on and if I can help with anything.  I am actually in talks at our university about creating a training group within the school that consists of our few "power" users so that people would know who to go to for help.  We have many users but only a few that really know QB and I'm sure many of those that just use QB don't know who to turn to for help.

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    Stephen Arnold
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  • 8.  RE: Community Tip Jar: Keeping Up With Your Users

    Posted 02-26-2020 13:27
    I love working with users. I am always looking for feedback from them by meeting or asking about additional function needed. We have a link we use for users to log issues, changes and requests embedded into out footer for our Realm. I also will reach out to uses as I learn about a new use case or functionality to see if it is something they could use and it helps start the conversations about opportunity for improvement.

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    Derek Hutchinson
    Business Process Manager
    PSG Dover
    Grand Rapids, MI
    269-779-5748
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  • 9.  RE: Community Tip Jar: Keeping Up With Your Users

    Posted 02-27-2020 10:53
    The best tip i can give for keeping up with the users is get to know them and periodically check in with them on how they are doing. I work with my users on a daily basis and just making sure they are able to use the app the way it was designed has helped with making adjustments and creates a positive environment for feedback!

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    Kelsi Bierhalter
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  • 10.  RE: Community Tip Jar: Keeping Up With Your Users

    Posted 02-27-2020 19:03
    Users often request updates to their apps. We take that opportunity to see how they are using, understand their request, and also ensure the app still functions the best way it can for them.

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    Debra Cote
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  • 11.  RE: Community Tip Jar: Keeping Up With Your Users

    Posted 03-04-2020 14:00

    We have several ways to review apps and users

    • periodic review of users that have not accessed Quick Base in over 90 days
    • periodic review of users that have not accessed apps in over 60 days
    • periodic review of user roles
    • periodic technical reviews
    • enabling sandbox


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    Janet Plumley
    Business Analyst and Rapid Application Development Manager
    CCI Systems, Inc.
    Iron Mountain, MI
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