Update: Community help - what's next - The giffgaff community

Update: Community help - what's next

roxy_r

Hello lovely people,

Hope you are all doing great and looking forward to hear about a few projects we are working on in the Help area of the community. Some of the changes might come sooner and some might take a bit longer to arrive but this is what we have planned for the near future.

1. Your 3 recently active help questions

I am sure you have seen quite a few of our new members being slightly confused about how to find the question they have posted in Help and Support. We have made a great step forward by having a 'Your questions' widget on the main Help page but we thought it would be very useful if we would have a similar widget on the Help and Support board.

This is roughly how it would look like:

Because we don't want to take up the entire page we will display only the latest 3 threads that have been active in the past 30 days. For anything more we have the link on the bottom right of the widget that takes you to the Help page where you can see more.

For members who have no threads active within the last 30 days, the widget will fully disappear, so those of you with really old threads (or none at all) in Help & Support won't see this new section.

Update: This feature is now live

2. Asking a question on the Help and Support board(stage 1).

The page/form that a member sees when clicking on Ask a question is a very general, forum like form and in some cases confuses newbies. It not only has loads of content that is not useful, but the copy does not help either. Making this page fit for purpose will be a slightly longer process and as stage one we have decided to eliminate the formatting options that almost never get used and improve the copy. We will put this up as a test just to make sure our assumptions are the right ones. Also, the change will only impact the creation of a new thread for now, not replying to an existing one. Once we get more insights into how this change has impacted the behaviour of new members asking a question we will be able to plan for stage two.

3. We are doing a bit of work on how we display who set a best answer. Not a massive change, we have just added a bit of background colour to identify who set the BA. So, we have Blue for the person that asked the question, Green for BA setters, Yellow for community staff and Black for any other staff member. There's also Grey for ex-staff members.

Hope you are all as excited as I am to get these changes up and running, learn from them and figure out where we go next. Let me know what you think.

Fluffiness,

Roxy

ray2

Brilliant news @roxy_r

I used the give help board for the first time a couple of days ago,it was really easy to use,and save the posts i had posted in 🙂 looking forward to the members notes becoming available.

As for members wanting help and finding their posts, the "your questions widget " sounds good as long as it's simple and easy to find.

Updating the Ask a question form is a long awaited improvement,worth the wait to get it right.

I like the idea of different colours for BA setting although i would like to see a list on the give help board to remind us what each colour means so we are aware who has set the BA answer (im too old to remember who set what and which colour they are 😀 )

mcilwraith

handy additions. nice to see who set the best answer back

bluemoonbaz

Cheers @roxy_r

Had a quick read and some great steps forward .

I will add further comment later

Great work giffgaff

geu42

I don't think you need the different colours, what's wrong with 'BA set by author, by BA setter, or by staff', as it is now?

I'd never remember what the colours mean.

tradertall

i doubt people forget their recent questions.

roxy_r

Thanks for the feedback folks!

The BA change is to just keep things consistent. We have 'badges' for staff next to the member name so we wanted to have everything in line. If we find out it is not adding value or actually making it worse then we can always go back to how it is now.

With the recent questions, you're right, they don't forget their question, they just have a hard time finding their way back to it. That is what sometimes causes duplicate threads. If we can point them to their question then we can get them to read the answers that are already posted on their thread rather than create a new one.

giffgaff20147

@roxy_r

Looks ok but don’t see point of colours for best answer setters and who will remember what colour is what I won’t

the rest is a big improvement to help newer members

shabazmoqsud

@roxy_r wrote:

Hello lovely people,

Hope you are all doing great and looking forward to hear about a few projects we are working on in the Help area of the community. Some of the changes might come sooner and some might take a bit longer to arrive but this is what we have planned for the near future.

1. Your 3 recently active help questions.

I am sure you have seen quite a few of our new members being slightly confused about how to find the question they have posted in Help and Support. We have made a great step forward by having a 'Your questions' widget on the main Help page but we thought it would be very useful if we would have a similar widget on the Help and Support board.

This is roughly how it would look like:

Because we don't want to take up the entire page we will display only the latest 3 threads that have been active in the past 30 days. For anything more we have the link on the bottom right of the widget that takes you to the Help page where you can see more.

For members who have no threads active within the last 30 days, the widget will fully disappear, so those of you with really old threads (or none at all) in Help & Support won't see this new section.

2. Asking a question on the Help and Support board(stage 1).

The page/form that a member sees when clicking on Ask a question is a very general, forum like form and in some cases confuses newbies. It not only has loads of content that is not useful, but the copy does not help either. Making this page fit for purpose will be a slightly longer process and as stage one we have decided to eliminate the formatting options that almost never get used and improve the copy. We will put this up as a test just to make sure our assumptions are the right ones. Also, the change will only impact the creation of a new thread for now, not replying to an existing one. Once we get more insights into how this change has impacted the behaviour of new members asking a question we will be able to plan for stage two.

3. We are doing a bit of work on how we display who set a best answer. Not a massive change, we have just added a bit of background colour to identify who set the BA. So, we have Blue for the person that asked the question, Green for BA setters, Yellow for community staff and Black for any other staff member. There's also Grey for ex-staff members.

Hope you are all as excited as I am to get these changes up and running, learn from them and figure out where we go next. Let me know what you think.

Fluffiness,

Roxy

@roxy_r the changes are great to help new members

One question though with the colour system for Best Answers does that mean we have like a sort of rank system for Best Answers like we do for community participations through number of posts and kudos?

jaymailsays

@roxy_r I am quite positive about the colour change for BA setters.

We will easily remember the existing Green, is the Black a sign of mourning for ex staff members? What colour will the typeface be?

Do you have a mock up, we can see.

Jay

as7861

Hi @roxy_r

That is great updates will help helpees

I was thinking if its possible, you know where the threads are listed under the your recent question.

There can something a line under to say You have a new reply (amount of reply here) . It makes so much friendlier in my view.

roxy_r

Great points! As soon as I have access to some early designs I will share it with you. Maybe we get Alex to talk a bit more about the BA change since he was the one that initiated it.

In the meantime, I would love to focus on the other two changes as to me, they are the more exciting ones 🙂

@as7861, that could be something for stage two. We want to get this out as soon as possible to see if members find it useful. If yes, then we can surely think of how we can make it better. We probably can redesign what we display on the widget for each thread and that sounds like something useful to have.

One question I would have for you would be: When it comes to simplifying the Ask a question form on the HS forum, if the test is successful and we decide to implement it, should we just implement it for newbies? So it could be that after you have reached a certain number of posts you see the full version. I guess it comes down to if you folks(members used to the community forum) use the Help forum to ask a question and if you do, how often and how many of the formatting options do you use?

cazaline71

@roxy_r

@roxy_r wrote:

One question I would have for you would be: When it comes to simplifying the Ask a question form on the HS forum, if the test is successful and we decide to implement it, should we just implement it for newbies? So it could be that after you have reached a certain number of posts you see the full version. I guess it comes down to if you folks(members used to the community forum) use the Help forum to ask a question and if you do, how often and how many of the formatting options do you use?

Perhaps at the bottom of the form, there could be a notice stating:

"You are using a simplified version of "Ask a Question", please click here for the full version"

What if there was an option allowing the user to enable or disable this feature in the user's settings. So when the "click here" link above is clicked, it will take the user to their settings page and allow them to disable/enable it.

Ironically, I just used the formatting feature for this post, but that's rare. Normally, I use shortcuts like Ctrl+(I/B/U) for italics, bold and underline. But the "insert spoiler", "insert link", "insert photo", "numbers", "bullet points" and Quote need to be there I think. I have never used the Studio or fonts and rarely use the insert code. The emojis are good too 🙂

Perhaps, just for this simplified version, the HTML and PREVIEW could be removed at the top?

roxy_r

Thanks for that @cazaline71, it sounds like a great idea if we can implement it. At the moment, for the test I am thinking of keeping: bold, italic, links, pictures, emojis and spell check. Everything else would go, including the HTML and Preview and also the labels and tags and we will try and make Email me when someone replies more prominent. Because it is a test, the easiest way is to cover up all the other options but if we find it to be successfully one solution would be to nest all the formatting options under 1 button. So you would still have access to it but it won't take up 3 rows(on mobile). I have seen quite a few newbies use the spoiler(within a spoiler, within a spoiler and so on) and code function which makes everything a bit harder for everyone.

The other idea for stage two might be to swap the two fields( body and subject) to see if it would reduce the number of newbies that put the entire issue in their subject line. So it could be something like: Explain to us the situation and after have a field to give it a title or better yet, maybe we can generate one for you and you can change it if you want. I guess what I am aiming for is a bit more handholding for members that are not used to forums.

cazaline71

@roxy_r

I think everything being planned and talked about is such a good idea. I like the sound of all the features that you've left in, it all sounds great! I look forward to seeing how this develops and look forward to testing it 🙂

blackfive460

@roxy_r wrote:

The other idea for stage two might be to swap the two fields( body and subject) to see if it would reduce the number of newbies that put the entire issue in their subject line. So it could be something like:

@roxy_r

Now that is a very good idea.

How about taking the first 15 or 20 characters or maybe up to the third, fourth or fifth space character from the body and use that as the default subject then when the body field text box loses focus, highlight the text in the subject for editing.

That way you'll get fewer blank subject fields.

Alternatively, leave things as they are and once the subject field contains more than, say, 50 characters, truncate it and move the contents and focus to the body text box?

It might even be possible to have some AI code that scans the text in the body and inserts an appropriate subject....

For example with; 'I've just joined giffgaff, activated my SIM but have no internet. What settings do I need?', the AI would pick up 'no internet' and 'settings' and insert a suitable subject.

If the AI was really smart it could even pop up a request for the make and model if it wasn't already mentioned in the body text.

And, if it was even smarter it could suggest the likely solution without the need to even post the message!

This is starting to sound like the beginnings of guided self help but I'll save that for another time. 🙂

roxy_r

That could be a way we could implement the auto-generating the subject line part, @blackfive460. I think I need to see what software we use for it. Also, we can swap the fields and just start taking samples of what do people put as their first 50 characters and then we would be able to figure out if we can use that as the subject line. Or, we could have some key words stored and and then have the AI pulling the right ones, as you said. I am very keen on getting that. Also, we could find a way to group all of those key words for the dashboard so we create a feed around one topic that might have multiple key words.

As soon as we get to a point where we can plan for this I will come pick your brains on how we group things, keywords and so on. But in the meantime, I do believe that even without the auto-generating part, we should still test so see if swapping the fields would make a difference.

I am on a quest to see what else we can do to make it really simple for members to post and of course, move help slowly towards a more guided approach. Things have changed, social media makes it so easy for people to post anything and consciously or subconsciously that is what our new members compare us to. I am not saying we should go all social media but there are plenty of things we can do to create a seemless experience from the moment they click Help on the top nav to asking a q on the forum.

timwilliams25

Seem like useful modifications

roxy_r

Heya folks,

Just a quick update to let you know the test on the Ask a question form is live now. This is the copy we have now but we will test a few over the next weeks. I'll let you know how we get on . If you have any ideas do let me know 🙂

brulaw

@roxy_r

Thanks for the update , looking good .... very clear and easy to use .