Inviting hub members via email

While reviewing hub members onboarding we found something that would be nice to have. This is the workflow we wish:

  1. A hub admin adds new customers
  2. the user receives an email to confirm his email address (IF the user is NEW to OFN)
  3. the user receives an email welcoming him to the hub
  4. the user clicks on the “welcome to the Hub” email and gets to the hub shop

I’m sure this has been discussed somewhere else in the email refactor threads, but I just wanted to make sure we’re going in this direction. User engagement during onboarding is critical and we should really take care of this step.

I’m sure @maxco can share some wisdom about this too :muscle:

just pinging @danielleand @ssteadand @MyriamBoure

@sauloperez I think we said at a first step that we would let the hub manager send an email to the members list (instead of an automatic email, also some hubs prefer to prepare the whole hubs set up before notifying the members and explaining them the steps to purchase, etc.) with the link to the shop page, and when they are on the page, they got a message asking them to sign up or login, and then they are redirected to the shop page.
Hope that’s ok to start with ? I’m not sure for customer only shop we want an automatic generic email, I guess every initiative havea specific way to communicate to their members, no ?

Definitely. I’m just worried about a user of the hub signing up with an email address other than the one in the members list.

This is something we can start with. We’ll see how we can improve this process further :thumbsup:

Letting the hub admins send an email by hand on their own it’s bad user experience. Adding a “send an invitation” feature that they can use once the shop is ready doesn’t seem too disruptive to implement to me. It basically doesn’t change anything to both kinds of hubs, right?

IMHO if we think at OFN as a product we need to tune the onboarding / engagement experience as first priority.

EDIT: the invitation email can just have a link to the shop and can be different based on the type of the hub (customer only for instance). If hub admins have another way to manage the invitation process they can just ignore our invitation button.

Yes, sure we can definitely add a button as you suggest it @enricostn, it’s just that it will only concern the private shops (customer only) so in terms of UX, it needs to be thought carefully so that other types of hubs don’t get confused… My preference would be for an emailig tool inside the OFN that enable to send a message to the members/customers, given also tags given to customers. Like they do in The Food Assembly for instance, or any other similar food hub management tools.
That way every hub can send the message easily and customise it for every circumstance. Thinking about the product, that is how I see it, rather than a buttton to send just one type of message…

can you say more about what you mean that ‘it will only concern the private shops’ ??? I am not understanding what would be confusing. Is the ‘notify producers’ button that is there now confusing?

From the UX point of view, what we suggest is the classic onboarding experience where an organization admin invites new members via email to the organization (a hub for instance in the OFN case).

The new members receive an email and they can join the hub and start buying.

This would be the easiest to implement as it doesn’t add any UI element, we just send an email to notify people that they have been added to a hub in this thing called OFN.

The other way, adding a button on the create customer form can be more intrusive since we need to actually add a button.

In both cases I don’t think that we need to apply this change only to “customer only” enterprises since in any case the admins will have to willingly create a new customer from /admin.

In any case we need to better understand the relationship between a User and a Customer, both in the product and in the code. And in which case we can assume that a Customer is also a member of the enterprise or just a customer.

I like this - but a clarification question @enricostn - in some situations hub’s require a paid membership before a cutomer can purchase. So I assume the invitation email would be customizable so the hub manager could say, "place a membership in your cart with your first order’ or something like that. And - none of this changes the situation when a customer registers themselves - correct? (This is only when the hub manager wants to actively invite?)

in some situations hub’s require a paid membership before a cutomer can purchase
"place a membership in your cart with your first order’ or something like that

Does OFN have a feature for paid memberships?

In any case @tschumilas I think it’s better to keep it simple. When the hub manager adds a customer he will receive an email, always. If there’s anything left for the customer to be ready to purchase, it should happen before inviting him.

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OK, so while working on some other part of OFN we discovered that we’re talking about different things… I guess :grimacing: Please correct me if I’m wrong.

What we need:

Hub admins can invite hub members, people that should be able to both:

  • buy from the hub shop
  • access reports and more stuff under /admin

Customers vs Enterprise users

Customers are people that just can buy from the shop, no other privileges or hub memberships are implied. Enterprise users can instead manage the hub, but we don’t understand if they can also shop from the hub.

Inviting Enterprise users NOT CUSTOMERS

Can we send an email to the user when we add her as an Enterprise user? Would that break any other workflow? This wouldn’t affect Customers at all.

Thoughts? Thanks!

I feel like this is something that would be really good to have @oeoeaio have a look at as he built a lot of this and I don’t pretend to be across the detail - certainly not in context of what is planned / being done in changes in the email confirmation project @MyriamBoure @lin_d_hop @danielle @maikel @sstead? Is the Email Confirmation project written up clearly somewhere so that @enricostn and @sauloperez can see how it will work?

From my quick scan of the above, a couple of questions

Needed:
Should these Hub members have full ‘manager’ enterprise user access, or do you want a subset? e.g. they can access reports and maybe products but not change payment / shipping methods? Easier if they do just have manager access but worth checking

So then, if adding a manager creates a user (which I think / seem to recall it does), then all that is needed is an option to also create a Customer for that User and Hub at the same time? Also, I think that once the manager is created there is a user, so the Hub Admin could create the Customer - but I realise that would be clunky!

Enterprise users can manage the Hub, and shop at the Hub IF there is no limitation to Members/Customers, otherwise option above is needed to make them a Customer at the same time

I think that if someone is added as an enterprise user and it is also creating the User, then they will get an email confirmation. But I think you are saying you would actually just want to notify them that they are now a Hub member/manager . . which would be creating a new email

Definitely this needs to be checked across with the email confirmation people and what they are changing - all pinged above!!

This is the email confirmation epic - https://github.com/openfoodfoundation/openfoodnetwork/issues/946

This is the issue that deal with adding ‘customers’ to the customer list, so they have permission to shop in member only shops. It’s in the email confirmation epic. https://github.com/openfoodfoundation/openfoodnetwork/issues/1493 . This issue is to fix the bug that exists currently- once fixed it will have basic functionality, but no ability to add custom email text to the welcome email, or other advanced jazz.

Regarding adding manager users - see this issue which describes current add manager functionality, and suggested improvements. this issue was deemed not required for email confirmation first version - https://github.com/openfoodfoundation/openfoodnetwork/issues/1593

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Thanks @sstead!!

. . I would love to map out with you and @danielle a suggested protocol for making it easy for people to find the project outlines / specs for major projects, which we could then take as a ‘straw man’ to the next global hangout. Could we maybe do this on Friday morning?

As a first step it might just be that we have ONE agreed place where people know to look and all commit to making sure everything is linked to that place e.g. a post in Wishlist or Dev/Doing that is clearly ‘the one’ - perhaps title prefixed with [SPEC] that has links to all/any google docs, posts, github epic or project, co-budget bucket, user guide pages etc. Then we don’t have to get everyone handling information in exactly the same way, just have ONE point so that people know where to look for it!!

connected to From Inception to Release

any thoughts or suggestions on this to feed into our draft @lin_d_hop @enricostn @NickWeir @jveilleux?

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Happy to chat about this @Kirsten on Friday. I think it’s another symptom of there being so many places to “talk” (slack, community boards, github) that things fall through the gaps and people use github or google docs or whiteboards to map stuff out (and therefore there’s no single way or place to do it.

I know I spend all my time in GitHub and am rarely on here. It’s easier for me, and to have to manage the same information in two places would be painful. So yes, let’s chat about this!

Thanks @Kirsten @sstead @danielle @tschumilas!

I think that https://github.com/openfoodfoundation/openfoodnetwork/issues/1593 is what we’re talking about in this thread. Glad to know that you’ve been discussing this already and sorry that we missed it!

We can investigate if for now we can use the “notifications hack” but it seems that the workflow could be confusing for the invited user.

I agree that it’s not strictly related to email confirmation epic, we would gladly contribute to this and implement a first iteration if it’s OK for you all.

cc/ @sseerrggii @sauloperez

Ok I read the whole discussion to understand your point better, so from my understanding there are two cases:

  • the hub manager wants to invite hub members (=other managers in the case of buying groups for instance) : then we could simply set up while reworking on the “add a manager” process that when you add a manager, he is automatically added to the customer list of the hub (which seems reasonable, I guess if you can manage you can shop in the case of a private shop…). That would avoid the hub manager to add them both in the manager field and then in the customer field. Maybe that should be added to the issue https://github.com/openfoodfoundation/openfoodnetwork/issues/1593
  • the hub manager wants to invite private shop customers: then after having thought again on it, it seem of to me actually to say that if you deliberatly add a customer through the “add customer button” it triggers a welcome email to that customer like “you have been invited to shop at [name of the hub], click here to access the shop!” It can actually apply also to non-private shop.
    If the hub manager doesn’t want an email to be triggered, we can maybe have a checkbox in the “new customer” form : Don’t notify the customer.
    That would be one thing to add to the issue https://github.com/openfoodfoundation/openfoodnetwork/issues/1493

Do you agree @enricostn @Kirsten @sauloperez @Rachel @danielle @tschumilas @sstead ?

[quote=“MyriamBoure, post:17, topic:989”]
the hub manager wants to invite private shop customers: then after having thought again on it, it seem of to me actually to say that if you deliberatly add a customer through the “add customer button” it triggers a welcome email to that customer like “you have been invited to shop at [name of the hub], click here to access the shop!” It can actually apply also to non-private shop. If the hub manager doesn’t want an email to be triggered, we can maybe have a checkbox in the “new customer” form : Don’t notify the customer.[/quote]

After the email confirmation functionality is live every user will need to verify their email address before they officially become a user and can log in.

So in this use case, if a hub manager invites a new a private shop customer who is not yet an OFN user with a verified email address, then that person will need to verify their email address to become a user.

This means that the customer will need to receive an email with their invitation to the private shop, and they will need to verify their email address and create their user account as part of that process before they can access the private shop. And therefore your idea to not notify the customer won’t work @MyriamBoure because they won’t become a customer unless they are a user and they can’t be a user unless they verify their email address.

Does that make sense?

@danielle I agree with you, maybe I was not clear enough in my description: a private shop manager may want to prepare his list of customers, etc. and then send a separate email when he is ready telling the customer to go to the shop page and create themself an account with this very same email to be able to access the shop (the system would then recognize and link them as a unique account).
But thinking again about it, I guess we can just stay with the first behavior (an invitation email is triggered) and see if a hub request something different if there is a case that we have not thought about. I guess they can prepare everything and test with fake emails before inviting the customers properly :wink: So let’s not anticipate the need, you are right !

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