UI enhancement: Ability to Flag Human Tasks to analysts as *new* or *updated* for a period; highlight them

[Berto2002]

Summary: I would like my analysts (Full Users) to be able to quickly identify newly added or edited Human Task nodes so they are drawn to pay attention to them.

We operate quite heavily on the principle of continual service improvement and iterative development of our workflows. We very often tweak the language in human task or add or remove step. We inform the analysts in comms or short update videos but in the heat of the moment when the analysts are running through workflows there is nothing to remind them when they hit one of those small areas that we've recently changed and sometimes that creates delay or confusion or errors. They are often running on auto-pilot and need a little hint to think at certain places.

I'd very much like the ability to flag a human task node as having been recently edited so that it appears as a different colour to the analyst when they reach that stage of the workflow.

How I see this working:

1. As the designer of the workflow, I would simply like a box on the human task that I can tick to flag this as a new or altered human task node
2. All the user interface needs to do is display that Human Task (activity) in a slightly highlighted colour. This will have the effect of alerting the analyst to pay particular attention when they reach one of these nodes to remind themselves of the change
3. I envisage that any such flag would always be temporary and will automatically disable after either a defined period or the admin has a date selector (like expiry). That way the UI only highlights if the fixed date is in the future.

I see this is a very easy thing to implement because it is non-functional; just a flag and the UI.

Thinking ahead, it raises other possibilities such as the ability to colour-code tasks according to their function or importance. E.g. Asset handling tasks could be green highlight, account management red, etc; enabling analysts to see at a glance the type of work to be done.

I imagine this sort of thing:

And it would look like this when opening the task:

Here are two options as to how it might look to the workflow designer. 1) a simple tick box which activates a 4 week timer each time the node is edited and 2) setting a specific day/month/year for the highlighting to expire (my favoured option)

I would welcome any comment or support for this analyst/usability/change focused suggestion.

[Steve Giller]

You could already easily achieve this by simply highlighting the changed areas on the Task Details, with font weight or colouring using the existing wiki markup.

[Berto2002]

I accept that's an idea that is similar but the important parts are:

1. It's visible before opening the task
2. It expires 'automatically' so we don't have to plan to go back to every node and take off the formatting