Seeking feedback: how do you find out that knowledge in Guru has changed?


Userlevel 3

Hi Community!

I’m Laura and I’m on the Product Management team here at Guru. Historically I’ve been focused on search and discovery–you may have seen me jump into conversations related to those areas here before. Recently, along with Kate, from our Design team, I’ve started to look into a new area and we are at the point where it would be wonderful to have your input on what we’re considering. Generally the goals of working on this new area are to:

  • Help you work confidently by surfacing information that’s valuable but not getting explicitly sent to you through channels like announcements.

  • Help you keep up with changes to information you rely on so you know you have the most current information available.

Overall this should reduce the effort it takes to find information you need, and make it easier for you to stay up to date. 

To give you a clearer sense of what the outcome of this research might be, we are currently looking to understand how people interact with favorites, how people learn about changes to content they care about, what kinds of content changes they care about, and how people would like to find out about those content changes. 

If this sounds interesting, there are a few ways you can provide input:

  • Reply to this post with a comment that you are interested in a 30 - 45 minute video chat and we’ll reach out to schedule a time. 

  • Leave a reply on this post with your thoughts on the following (shortened) set of questions with either your own thoughts or thoughts you’ve heard from your team:

    • What kinds of cards do you favorite today? Do you go back to look at them? Why or why not? 

    • How often do you look at your favorite cards? Why is it on that frequency?

    • When you see a card, what makes you decide to favorite it?

    • If you could be informed that a card you care about had been changed, would you want to be? How would you want to be informed?

    • If you edit cards and share them with other people after publishing them without using an announcement, how do you do that? Why do you choose not to use announcement functionality in those cases?

    • In what situations do you use the “Details” panel on a card to see when an update to a card was made or who made it?

Thank you so much for your time, we greatly appreciate it!


10 replies

Userlevel 5
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  • What kinds of cards do you favorite today? Do you go back to look at them? Why or why not? 

    • Favorite cards that I’ll want to easily see are “key” in the future (ex. an index of all related resources to _____, a card with significant numbers of similarly worded titles/content that could appear in search result, etc.). I go back and look at them when searching/navigating other cards, but not specifically going back to review all favorites at once. 

  • How often do you look at your favorite cards? Why is it on that frequency?

    • Infrequently, I’ve only found myself there “organically” a few times. 

  • When you see a card, what makes you decide to favorite it?

    • If I know I’ll need it later but may either forget it exists OR struggle to find it.

  • If you could be informed that a card you care about had been changed, would you want to be? How would you want to be informed?

    • Yes! I’d want to be informed via a feed of recently updated materials. Ideally, this could be a default view. 

  • If you edit cards and share them with other people after publishing them without using an announcement, how do you do that? Why do you choose not to use announcement functionality in those cases?

    • We share via Slack primarily. This is to use a channel we know the team is active on constantly throughout the day. Also, because it easily creates a visibile dialogue via thread (that can also pop up in Slack search). Our second most frequent is email, since this resource can be left unread while “triaging” an inbox. I’ve found that our team values Guru but, frustratingly, ignores knowledge alerts… I seem to get as many viewers via email or Slack as I do with knowledge alerts (where I still had to ping people, including managers). 

  • In what situations do you use the “Details” panel on a card to see when an update to a card was made or who made it?

    • I use this often. I like to check how widely newly created cards have reached our team - created without fanfare, socialized in some manner, put on blast to a team/the whole org, etc. 

Userlevel 3

Thank you @Shona Fenner for replying quickly and for the detail, very helpful! 

Userlevel 3
  • What kinds of cards do you favorite today? Do you go back to look at them? Why or why not? 

    • Most of my favorites are ‘Company Handbook’ type items like RTO updates, Holiday Calendars, etc. I tend to go back to these types of Cards to check if anything has been updated, or because it’s helpful info to have on hand to share with others.

  • How often do you look at your favorite cards? Why is it on that frequency?

    • Probably every few weeks; either during trainings or to check for updated content.

  • When you see a card, what makes you decide to favorite it?

    • There’s usually three use cases for me, either (1) I think it’s a great example of a Guru Card and so I favorite it to highlight it as a good example within our best practices Collection, (2) it’s a Card I want to use in a demo/training so need to access it easily or (3) it’s something I’m referring back to fairly frequently (like items within our Company Handbook)

  • If you could be informed that a card you care about had been changed, would you want to be? How would you want to be informed?

    • Only if there were significant changes made to the content, but yes I would like to be informed. It would be nice to have it Announcement style where I get a Slack notification and visibly see it on my dashboard. 

  • If you edit cards and share them with other people after publishing them without using an announcement, how do you do that? Why do you choose not to use announcement functionality in those cases?

    • Usually via Slack feeds that we have set up to specific channels, or just sharing within Slack or email. Our organization hasn’t fully adopted Announcements yet (unfortunately) so we don’t use them frequently.

  • In what situations do you use the “Details” panel on a card to see when an update to a card was made or who made it?

    • Usually when an important Card is Unverified, I’ll look in the Details tab to check for most recent updates and who made them

Userlevel 3
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@Rachel Wiggins and I would love to do a call and discuss these things! 

Userlevel 3

Thanks so much for the input @Valerie Renda

@Sarah W & @Rachel Wiggins - Awesome, I’ll send you an email momentarily!

  • What kinds of cards do you favorite today? Do you go back to look at them? Why or why not? 

    • I started favoriting ones I refer to a lot but honestly don’t go back and look at them very often; I feel like Favorites are hard to find and get cluttered really easily; generally I just start typing in the name of the card into my Chrome browser and it will pop up

  • How often do you look at your favorite cards? Why is it on that frequency?

    • not super often due to above reasons; but the reason I would look at them is to share with someone else asking for the information

  • When you see a card, what makes you decide to favorite it?

    • I generally favorite cards that I refer to often because other people are asking for the info; usually posting in Slack

  • If you could be informed that a card you care about had been changed, would you want to be? How would you want to be informed?

    • I think this would be incredibly useful for our sales team to stay on top of relevant product info

    • probably the choice of email or slack; i’m an email gal (old school) so I usually save important emails for Fridays to read

  • If you edit cards and share them with other people after publishing them without using an announcement, how do you do that? Why do you choose not to use announcement functionality in those cases?

    • I’ve used it before but I do not believe we have every sales rep on a paid account and therefore they can’t receive announcements; generally will post in a Slack channel and/or email depending on how important it is

  • In what situations do you use the “Details” panel on a card to see when an update to a card was made or who made it?

    • When it’s out of date and/or to make sure it’s been updated recently

Userlevel 4
Badge +4

Also happy to hop on a video chat as well!

 

What kinds of cards do you favorite today? Do you go back to look at them? Why or why not? 

  • Cards that are geared for Specialists - who are dedicated to a specific area of our product, and need to refer to them more than the average frontline agent
  • Private cards - that are only for Specialists / specific folks who have the training (there is no way to publish a card and make it private to see it in navigation, favouriting is our workaround)
  • Best Practices cards - for newly onboarded folks who need to easily reference certain workflows

 

How often do you look at your favorite cards? Why is it on that frequency?

  • The frequency depends on trends in our support cases (downtime/outages, new feature update, tax season) 
  • Newly onboarded folks tend to reference more frequently until they are able to retain info
  • Specialists reference favourite cards as frequently as needed especially for reference information (e.g., copying and pasting API calls, scripts, macros)

 

When you see a card, what makes you decide to favorite it?

  • Similar to first question above, usually because it is related to their subject matter expertise / speciality area
  • Help with retention if it’s a new feature / concept that they can easily grab
  • Easy to reference favourite cards vs. trying to search for a needle in a haystack

 

If you could be informed that a card you care about had been changed, would you want to be? How would you want to be informed?

Yes. A lot of my Guru users (support agents) want to know when info has been updated. Methods of informing range from: 

  • Some prefer to be notified via a Slack “RSS style”-feed, which I’ve set up using a Zapier → Slack integration. Currently it is missing the ability to batch updates together (e.g., the same card was edited and saved multiple times, but should only post in the Slack channel once rather than every time) and the ability to show what was updated (redlining, indicates exactly what was changed/removed). 

     Also mentioned in this FS: 

 

  • Some prefer a similar setup to Confluence/Jira’s Watch function, where they get emailed/notified in Jira every time there is an update to a page/ticket, with the details of what was changed in the email/notification. 
     
  • Some currently go into the Guru card and click on the Details sub-tab inside the card to see the redlining specifically. A few have said this is tedious to do multiple clicks to access this info every time for every Guru card they’re interested in. 


Additional context: 

  • We do not use Knowledge Alerts / Announcements due to low adoption/noise with other types of applications (e.g., we have Slack and Zendesk announcements already)
  • Very few actually use the feed that appears on the right-hand side inside the Guru web app

 

If you edit cards and share them with other people after publishing them without using an announcement, how do you do that? Why do you choose not to use announcement functionality in those cases?

Up until recently, we didn’t share any new/updated Guru cards with our users on a consistent basis, aside for a few cases: 

  • Some Specialists would make a slack post in a specific channel to announce new / updated cards specific to their area
  • When a new feature or update to our product is shipped, we make an announcement post and include a link to any Guru cards if applicable


Now that we have the “RSS-style” feed in Slack via Zapier, people are starting to use that to see what new cards were published recently. 

As mentioned in previous question above, we don’t use Announcements because it has had low adoption every time we’ve tried it out, and we already have too much noise with other apps’ announcements. So primarily we stick to Slack for announcements.
 

In what situations do you use the “Details” panel on a card to see when an update to a card was made or who made it?

A lot of people use Details as mentioned in the 4th question above, because they want to see the redlining (exactly what was updated/changed), because oftentimes the changes are very small but important. 

Most people do not care about who made the update, but knowing when it happened is also important so they can ensure their knowledge is up to date.

Userlevel 3

Thank you @Lindsay Dandy and @brookethebatman for your thoughts, I really appreciate it!

Brooke, you’ll have an email from me shortly!

Userlevel 2
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Hi @Laura Desmond-Black. Really excited about you’re looking into this. Our users have asked for more ways to keep up with info changes, and they’ve also requested expanded favorites features (e.g. nesting, organization, personal comments, and more.)

 

I’ve summarized answers from our users  - see below. Happy to chat as well!

 

What types of cards do you favorite?

  • Frequently used processes & general information

  • Cards that are hard to find or good to have handy for niche situations

  • Groups of feature related cards

  • Overviews that link out to other cards

 

Do you go back to look at your favorites? How often? Why or why not?

  • Yes, because I need it 90% of the time and it saves time over manually searching each time

  • I look at my favorites when I know there's something I really need from there

  • From time to time, I'll go and review my favorites to see if the cards there are still relevant or not.

  • I usually read them once and re-visit as needed

 

When you see a card, what makes you decide to favorite it?

 

  • if it's fairly specific/useful, hard to find, or  will have a chance to appear in the future
  • If it’s something I would need once in a blue moon.

  • the type of information included and whether I think I will need that card again

 

If you could be informed that a card you care about had been changed, would you want to be? If so, how?

 

  • Option for author to send notification on behalf of changes

  • Notification box at top of card with summary of changes

  • email/slack notification

 

In what situations do you use the “Details” panel on a card to see when an update to a card was made or who made it?

 

  • To check revision history and view context regarding changes
  • To check who updated a card and when

 

Userlevel 3

Thanks @Amelia Altstadt, very helpful! You’ll have an email from me shortly :) 

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