What’s the difference?
While both the My Tasks and My Activities widget types are used to show consumers the activities they have available to take part in within InsightHub, the ‘My Activities’ widget also includes community activity updates for the consumer, such as a recent thread being started in a Forum Topic, another user posting a comment in ‘forum X’, or a new poll going live, for example.
Therefore, if you have both a ‘My Tasks’ and a ‘My Activities’ widget showing in your consumer-facing homepage or project page, they might see the same activity mentioned in each widget. For example, in the images below, a new poll about Christmas snacks has been posted, which shows in the consumer’s ‘My Tasks’ widget to encourage them to take part. They also see the ‘new poll’ notification for the same activity in their ‘My Activities’ widget, as this is more of an ‘update’ to show them what is happening within the platform.
My Tasks Widget – Example
My Activities Widget - Example
Setup
To set up a ‘My Tasks’ or ‘My Activities’ widget, go to Back Room > Projects and select the project where you would like to add this. Then…
- Click ‘Layouts’ in the tabs along the top of the project page
- Click ‘Add a widget’ in the position on the page where you would like the widget to show to consumers. For example, if you add a widget here, this will show in the top left of the consumer-facing page (position 1) for consumers:
- Add a consumer-facing title
- Add an internal name and header image (optional)
- Select the desired widget position, width and height
- Update border colour and help text (optional). Border colour is white by default.
- Use the tick boxes to indicate if you would like the widget to show on the mobile site, desktop site, or both
- Use the drop-down menus to indicate how many rows and columns you’d like to show in the widget
- Finally, tick to indicate if you would like to hide or show the footer link for the widget
4. The process now becomes a little different depending on whether you are setting up a ‘My Tasks’ or a ‘My Activity’ widget.
If setting up a ‘My Tasks’ type widget, you have completed setup, and just need to click ‘Save widget’ for this to show on the consumer-facing page
If setting up a ‘My Activities’ type widget, there are a few additional options to configure which activity and notification types you’d like to include / exclude within the widget. Under the heading ‘Sub-zones to include’, you can tick the project pages you would like the widget to be visible to, or leave this blank to include all projects.
Top tip: These additional settings can also be used create ‘My Activities’ type widgets for specific use cases, such as only showing the ‘Forum’ task type updates. For example:
In this case, the setup within the widget for notifications and activities would look like this:
Which widget type should I use?
You can choose to use either the ‘My Tasks’ widget type or the ‘My Activities’ widget type, or both within your consumer-facing homepage or project pages, however, there are certain benefits to each in different situations.
‘My Tasks’ is great as a simple ‘snapshot’ list of activities the consumer has available to take part in at any given time.
‘My Activities’ also offers a list of activities the consumer has available to them, but has a ‘community’ feel to it, also containing community updates so consumers can view what fellow users have been doing lately within the platform. In order to keep your InsightHub working at optimum capability and speed for both client-type and consumer-type users, this widget type works well in small to medium sized communities, which are not aiming to pull through updates from many different tasks, and to many different consumers.
Top tip: If you want to use the My Tasks or the My Activities widget, but prefer the title of the opposite widget type, don’t forget you can choose the widget title yourself. So, you can have a My Tasks widget titled ‘My Activities’, or a My Activities widget titled ‘My Tasks’, for example.