A call for feedback from the community

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After receiving feedback concerning one of the most well known User Experience (User XP) features, labels management, we are now facing a difficult choice.
We believe that the best solution is the one that best fits the need of the community, so we are requesting your input.

This is about how users like to organize their list of tasks in Bonita User XP.

We are currently using a label approach:

  • Bonita User XP offers 6 predefined labels: Inbox, Starred, Unread, My Cases, Archive and All.
  • The definition of these labels is shared by all User XP users, for instance "My Cases" always means "cases started by me".
  • Some of these are automatically attached to cases by the system, i.e., Inbox, Unread and My Cases.
User XP also allows all users to define their own custom labels. A custom label is a means for each user to organize their tasks accordingly to their own logic. The list of custom labels is user specific and is private.

That is to say, that if user “John”

  • creates a label "todoBeforeHolidays"
  • assigns this label to the case "review Jack's report"
then neither the label nor the association between the label and the case will be visible by anyone other than "John".

The feedback we have received is that some people would prefer to see all labels assigned automatically to cases by the server instead of having users doing it manually.
We are considering the possibility to replace the current feature with a new one, not only because of this feedback but also because this powerful feature has a cost: heavy queries are executed against the database and impact the reaction time of the User XP.

An alternative to the label approach is the tag approach:

  • Only authorized users can create new tags.
  • Tags are automatically attached to cases by the server according to predefined criteria, e.g., instances of "Vacation_Request" are assigned tags "HR" and "Vacation".
  • The case-tag association is visible by ALL the users involved in the case.
  • Consequently all the users will have the same predefined tags to sort and search with. (The logic is centralized)
This approach seems less flexible from a simple user point point of view, as they cannot organize their tasks with their own system (cannot create new tags or change the tag-case associations). The advantages of this approach seem to be:
  • standardize the organization of tasks among all the users
  • guarantee that users will not "lose" a task by attaching a wrong label
  • reduce the impact on the User XP reaction time (less data stored in the database and lighter queries)
Advantages Disadvantages
Label approach user logic performance affected
Others? Others?
Tag approach central logic user cannot customize
performance maintained user acceptance (in case of migration)
Others? Others?
Which approach do you prefer? What other advantages and disadvantages do you see?