Categories help people come up with more relevant ideas and ease your job in segmenting, managing, and analyzing the data. They also make it possible to send automatic notifications to managers ("category owners") about new ideas related to their work.
Best practices for using categories
We recommend choosing your categories so that they’re clearly distinctive to you and all the users on the board. If you have very complex individual categories, try to keep their names simple and further define them using the description feature.
Categories work best when they are picked to match your board’s focus. For example:
Company functions or units
Certain aspects of a process or product
Individual products or services, product lines
Parts or phases of a project
If you wish to create a categorical hierarchy with subcategories, this can be achieved by either using our custom fields or tag features, depending on how you'd like subcategories to work.
How to get there
Note: To be able to complete the following steps, you’ll need to have an admin account for the desired Viima board. Please contact your Viima super user for access if you don’t already have an account.
If you already know your board name, the easiest way to manage categories is through the following URL:
https://app.viima.com/admin/organization-name/board-name/#settings
If you do this, proceed directly to Step 2. Otherwise, start from Step 1.
Step 1
On the dashboard of your organization, go to "Settings" in the admin portal
Step 2
Under "Settings", in the "General" sub-section, click "Categories"
Step 3
Enable categories by turning on the toggle
Step 4
Start adding new categories by clicking the "Add new" button
Step 5
Create your own category by filling in the form fields.
The "Name" field simply determines the name of the category.
In the "Category Owners" field you can define category-specific owners/admins by typing down the emails of those you wish to give this role to. Each email address must be separated by a comma or semicolon. All category owners are automatically notified via email about new ideas in their category.
"Filter automatically" and "Hide ideas by default" are used for automatically showing and hiding ideas in the category whenever users enter the board. More info about these features can be found in separate sections below.
In the "Description" field you can tell users additional info about the category. This helps users better grasp the purpose of individual categories. The description can be seen on the board by hovering your mouse over the category in the left sidebar.
When you're happy with the category, click the "Save" button in the lower right corner.
Filtering categories automatically
If you'd like users to only see ideas in certain categories whenever they enter the board, you can create an automatic filter that does it by selecting the checkbox in the editing modal. Users will still be able to see all the ideas at any point if they choose to clear the filters.
Hiding categories by default
If you'd like certain categories' ideas to be hidden from users whenever they enter the board, you can hide the categories by default by selecting the checkbox in the editing modal. Users will still be able to see the ideas in those categories at any point if they select the categories from the filters in the left sidebar.
Editing a category
You can always edit your board's categories by clicking the "Edit" button on the right side of a category in the "Basic settings" tab. If you edit a category's name to a more descriptive one, for example, the category's name will change in all ideas in that category.
Deleting a category
Should you want to delete a category, you can do it by editing the category as instructed above. Once you have the editing modal open, click the red "Delete" button in the lower left corner.
You then need to click the checkbox before clicking the "Delete" button again to conclude the deletion. Note, that all ideas in that category will be set to "Not defined" category.
Changing the order of categories
You can change the order of your categories by clicking the "Drag" icon at the left side of a category field and dragging the category to another position. The order of the categories on the admin portal dictates their order on the board as well.
Default category
When a user is creating an idea on the board, they are required to set a category for the idea if categories are enabled. Users can always decide which category to select, but you can also define a default category, which is automatically preset when creating a new idea.
If you want to set a default category, start by hovering your mouse over a category. You should then see a blue chip on the category bar. Set the category as the default by clicking the chip.
If you don't want the category to be the default anymore, you can click the small "x" on the chip to remove the category from being the default. You can also change the default category by clicking the chip's place in any other category bar. Note, that you can have only one default category at a time.
Don't forget to save your changes!
Green "Save" buttons can be found on all pages where changes can be made. Clicking this activates those changes.