This idea is to provide clients a way to freely search and locate Request Types when submitting new tickets within SolarWinds Web Help Desk. This is for the client side of the help desk and although this idea could branch out to the technician's interface, I am creating this concept around the fact that your techs are well adept to working in your help desk and are aware of the categories available, unlike your clients.
Noting that there doesn't seem to be a limit to the amount of request types you can have, this gives us the potential of creating hundreds and thousands of categories with even more hundreds and thousands of sub-categories for our requests. A hugely beneficial feature, but one not to be taken lightly when creating and sorting your categories...
This feature significantly improves client experience (UX improvement):
- New clients can locate categories easily without sifting through your list of request types
- Existing clients can locate categories for requests that they may not have submitted before
- Lowers time to locate a category
Ideas
| Concept 1: A separate search box that displays a list of categories to match your search criteria as you input data.
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| Concept 2: A search available within the request type could give you an overall drop-down from the parent categories as you would usually use this, or , this will give example tags to match your search criteria as you're typing.
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| Concept 3: A search icon that when hovered over or selected will display a text-box to search for a request type.
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Overcoming Issues
As mentioned earlier, there is no limit to how many sub-categories you can have within a request type. The only issue I can come up with for this idea is that the more sub-categories you have, the more difficult it becomes to display the recommended search results without making the page go ridiculously out of control. We could potentially bypass this issue by restricting the amount of sub-request types we can have, but this would be a loss of great functionality, so I've come up with another solution... If the search results are displayed in a box that is re-sizable and scrollable. This would make the feature usable without the confusion of what child request is within which parent, whilst also making it scalable for different screen sizes.
Let me know if you think of any further issues. |
Thanks for checking my idea out and helping me refine it. 
-Midnight
Did You Know?: There's an 80 character limit to Request Type names.
This request is subject to change, it may be revised, edited and updated over time. If you have any feedback or something further to add or correct, please comment or pm me.
