21–30 of 35 posts
Is there a good equivalent to UserVoice for internal helpdesks? (Or is UserVoice flexible enough to work well in an internal situation?) This kind of "pull up a FAQ while the user enters a ticket" tech could work incredibly well for fortune 500 companies, schools, universities, etc.
Papering over user support with an FAQ is addressing the symptom, not the problem. You should consider an FAQ to be a stop gap, until you fix your bad software. Example: We get a request or two per week in Gaia GPS for people asking "How to I delete a waypoint?" and other people seem to search for "Gaia GPS delete waypoint" on Google too. To do this, you swipe the row of the waypoint to be deleted in a table view, an…
Agreed that you should be making your product better...I think that's perhaps the unsung goal with our reporting system. If an article gets read a lot, look at how you can improve it in your product. But you can't fix things fast enough and there will always be someone confused (If you build it one day, user X will be confused. Build it another, user Y will be confused.) so having good documentation is key, in our op…
This reminds me of another thing we do - when we make new apps, we don't provide a manual to the beta group. We make one after the fact, but we want to get feedback from users as if there are no instructions.
Your product is awesome btw. We use it in two apps, and plan to add it to a third soon.
"You give the same answer you always give. Another 5 minutes of your (and your customer’s) life wasted." For certain types of businesses having the customer send you an email that you have to respond to (and we use auto complete emails so they are knocked out in After all companies do all sorts of things to get customer interaction. There is nothing better than building customer loyalty (once again depending on the p…
Wow. That wouldn't go down well with me.
Papering over user support with an FAQ is addressing the symptom, not the problem. You should consider an FAQ to be a stop gap, until you fix your bad software. Example: We get a request or two per week in Gaia GPS for people asking "How to I delete a waypoint?" and other people seem to search for "Gaia GPS delete waypoint" on Google too. To do this, you swipe the row of the waypoint to be deleted in a table view, an…
Agreed that you should be making your product better...I think that's perhaps the unsung goal with our reporting system. If an article gets read a lot, look at how you can improve it in your product. But you can't fix things fast enough and there will always be someone confused (If you build it one day, user X will be confused. Build it another, user Y will be confused.) so having good documentation is key, in our op…
I agree that you can never make a product that 100% of people can use with ease, but you can get close, and you can make changes that help User X without alienating User Y.
Case in point: iPads don't come with instruction manuals, and toddlers and old people both use them with ease.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Agreed that you should be making your product better...I think that's perhaps the unsung goal with our reporting system. If an article gets read a lot, look at how you can improve it in your product. But you can't fix things fast enough and there will always be someone confused (If you build it one day, user X will be confused. Build it another, user Y will be confused.) so having good documentation is key, in our op…
I also disagree with this assertion - "If you build it one day, user X will be confused. Build it another, user Y will be confused." I agree that you can never make a product that 100% of people can use with ease, but you can get close, and you can make changes that help User X without alienating User Y. Case in point: iPads don't come with instruction manuals, and toddlers and old people both use them with ease.
Although it took me nearly an hour to figure out how to copy some videos I had transcoded to the device.
Lots and lots of people don't read FAQs. They don't even read instructions on how to download something or register software, they just write to support ("where is my product?"), so my advice is: FIX YOUR SOFTWARE. Example: BlogJet (blog client I wrote) required entering XML-RPC endpoint URL for a blog to create an account. Of course, few people knew the endpoint URL for their blogging engine, so 80% of support reque…
One simple example is that when using QCryptographicHash a common operation is to compare the results to a hex string. QCryptographicHash::result() returned a QByteArray which isn't a hex string. So after seeing more than one person ask how to do this I added a "\seealso QByteArray::toHex()" to the documentation.
http://doc.trolltech.com/4.7/qcryptographichash.html#result
Another favorite thing to do was if people were looking for a function say called "Foo::search", but it was actually called "Foo::query" I would add the word "search" inside of the Foo::query docs so at the bare minimum if they searched on the Foo page they would find the word search and the api they needed. Often after that help for Foo::search disappear. (or to do bla you have to call X() and Y(), mentioning bla in X and Y's docs really help)
There was a lot of pride in the Qt documentation and little improvements like this all of the time really helped to make the dev experience better.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Agreed that you should be making your product better...I think that's perhaps the unsung goal with our reporting system. If an article gets read a lot, look at how you can improve it in your product. But you can't fix things fast enough and there will always be someone confused (If you build it one day, user X will be confused. Build it another, user Y will be confused.) so having good documentation is key, in our op…
I also disagree with this assertion - "If you build it one day, user X will be confused. Build it another, user Y will be confused." I agree that you can never make a product that 100% of people can use with ease, but you can get close, and you can make changes that help User X without alienating User Y. Case in point: iPads don't come with instruction manuals, and toddlers and old people both use them with ease.
Yes, they're easy to use. Are they so easy to use that nobody ever needs any help with them? No.
So why the hell are we still wasting time responding to the same damn questions? Because customers never read anyway.
In other words, it overestimates the time savings from having an FAQ.
"You give the same answer you always give. Another 5 minutes of your (and your customer’s) life wasted." For certain types of businesses having the customer send you an email that you have to respond to (and we use auto complete emails so they are knocked out in After all companies do all sorts of things to get customer interaction. There is nothing better than building customer loyalty (once again depending on the p…
> having the customer send you an email [...] is a great opportunity to try to sell them something else or even answer a survey question etc. Wow. That wouldn't go down well with me.
What's wrong with showing an extra line saying, for example, "by the way did you know that we also offer site monitoring which you can get for an additional $ per month"?
It's similar to the viral marketing that started with the "get your own free email at hotmail.com" as a result of Tim Draper's suggestion...