Release

Quick links are here!

Quick links are here!
We're excited to announce that the quick links feature that we recently posted about are now available in your community.





Quick links can be added to your homepage and are there to guide your users to virtually wherever you want your users to be: a FAQ article, an important category, a list of topics with a specific tag and more. You can point to everything that has an URL.





Setting up quick links is easy as pie and gives you direct visual feedback on how the quick links will appear on your community. You can find more information on setting up quick links in the guide below:





How To Set Up Quick Links On Your Homepage





A list of specifications




  • Quick links will be shown on the Homepage

  • Quick links can point to both an internal and external URL

  • Quick links are responsive and will evolve into a horizontal scroll list on small devices

  • You can set up as many quick links as you like

  • You can choose between 3 different types of quick links: plain text, icon or image



We hope you like this new feature. If you have any feedback drop us a comment below 👇
@Denisevdo Just I like I showed you this afternoon!
@chrishottentot en @Emile


De quick links zijn nu beschikbaar, dus jullie kunnen er mee aan de slag!
Can you combine featured topics and quick links? Or are you supposed to replace your featured topics with quick links?
We did not change the featured topics, they can still be used but will be displayed below the quick links card. It is up to you if you want to replace the featured topics or use them side by side with the quick links. :)





We believe the quick links are a powerful navigation tool that can point your visitors to the right direction (mostly an overview or a link to somewhere outside the community) whereas featured topics are more aimed at highlighting one specific subject.
The feature Quick links (Forum Settings / Homepage / Quick links) doesn't have the option 'open in a new tab'.





The option 'open in a new tab' provides community owners the ability to integrate with other platforms while they can provide members the ability to preserve what’s on the active tab and open a new tab. Hence, this gives a better User Experience.
We respected default URL behaviour for URL's that are setup within the platform (click on a topic, category, username etc.) If a user wants to open a quick-link in a new tab he can do so by 'CTRL/CMD' + Click on a quick link card 🙂
I can relate to the given answer, but it should not be assumed that every community member knows CTRL/CMD' + Click on a quick link card.





The option 'open in a new tab' gives the community manager the opportunity to decide whether he wants it or not.
Correct, assumptions are not a good measurement 😉 Let us investigate this 🙂 To be on the same level: this option should apply to all quick-links, and not individual quick-links right? It would be strange that some quick links open in a new tab and others open in the same tab.





I like the quick links on your community by the way. Good job 😃
Why do you find it strange that some quick-links open in a new tab and others on the same tab? It depends on the content, doesn't it?





Thank you!
We believe the quick links are a powerful navigation tool that can point your visitors to the right direction (mostly an overview or a link to somewhere outside the community) whereas featured topics are more aimed at highlighting one specific subject.





As naviational elements I do think they could be helpful, especially for guiding infrequent users and giving the community manager more choice in designing the community for his/her audience. But IMO the potential is not





Startpage:




  • having quick-link navigation plus current startpage for large communities is overwhelming and will create an inconsistent experience for users.

  • Therefore, I would suggest to enable for the startpage a choice

  • a) either a graphical navigation (as you intend above) or

  • b) the current text-oriented startpage

  • c) enable both and users can choose in their profile (depending on their maturity)



Subforum:




  • for consistency of the navigational experience, quick links need to be enabled for sub-forums as well as quoted several times above

  • Within the sub-forums there usually are several sub-topics (identified by tags); quick-linking to these tags can help users navigate to the content they are interested in.



Ideally, when really using a quick-link navigation, the order of the quick-links would be depending on the users' behavior and preferences, e.g. when a user is mainly active in forums a & b but not on c and only a few times in d, the order would be a, b, d, c. The same principle applies to tag-based quick-links.


This personalization would have an immediate benefit for the users as they can navigate directly quickly to the content they are interested in.





Cheers,


Florian
I don't want to be a Debbie Downer, but looking at the data I don't see a lot of reason or incentive to improve the homepage with features like this one at all. Topic visits account for pretty much all forum visits, because of a thing called Google.











Therefore, it makes more sense to me for Insided to work on improvements for topic pages. For example: providing a search query that delivers relevant content in the 'related topics' Topic Sidebar widget. Right now, these "related" topics literally might as well be completely random. Actual related topics might actually help users find their answer.





When it comes to the homepage, I'd recommend you build improvements with the needs in mind of the user group that is important to us and use the homepage most actively: super users. For example, this idea.
Hi @Jurgen ,





thanks for sharing the insight! :)





Therefore, it makes more sense to me for Insided to work on improvements for topic pages. For example: providing a search query that delivers relevant content in the 'related topics' Topic Sidebar widget. Right now, these "related" topics literally might as well be completely random. Actual related topics might actually help users find their answer.






Totally, agree that the relevant topics are currently not useful and most of the time non-relevant!





When it comes to the homepage, I'd recommend you build improvements with the needs in mind of the user group that is important to us and use the homepage most actively: super users.






Well, it depends a bit also on the absolute numbers - I have not only SuperUsers (would gladly have that many! 😉 ) on the homepage, and the number is big enough to pay some attention to it.




For example, this idea.






I really like your idea of providing a more personal experience to all the users and have expanded the thought





Cheers,





Florian
Interesting discussion going on, thanks for sharing your feedback and insights!
We just deployed a configuration option that allow you to open a quick-link in a new tab. When adding or editing a new quick-link you can select where it should open (default is in the same tab)








@Moller Toma hope you enjoy this improvement 🙂
@youri Great! But unfortunately it doesn't work. The Quick Links still open in the same tab.
Strange... I just clicked on the "status incident page"-quicklink (from the example) and it worked for me!?





Did you try it in your own environment? If you can point to where it does not work, we can check what the reason is.
Let us investigate.
@Julian it seems like the changes are not always applied successfully from the control environment to front-end. I logged in again and the changes were not successfully applied, so I tried it again and now it works!
Thanks for the additional info. Yoeri will pick this up, I am sure they will be able to iron this out!
Are there plans to make quick-links vailable to parent categories or categories (forums), i.e. enabling the community manager to give a support forum a different look & feel from a board where members talk about entertainment?
No, we don't have plans for this Florian. For what purposes would you like to use quick-links in (paren) category pages, where would you link to?
Quick Links for categories can serve a very important role in customer support. But as it is limited to the home page, we don't have a practical use for it now.





Currently Quick Links is the only function that enables us to directly link to external sources. Our community isn't the only place to provide customer support, it is a part of a whole set of channels and support sources.





Example: We have a community category about billings for mobile contracts. Outside our community, in the customer area, there is a service section regarding billings - containing FAQs, personalized information and other useful features. Right now it is not possible to provide our customers direct links from our category page to the customer area - Quick Links would be the ideal solution to do that. This way we could enrich every category page as a full scale landing page for all questions and issues revolving billings for mobile contracts (or whatever the category is about, like DSL, Network issues, and so on).





We really like Quick Links and we want to use them. But it is no use for us on the homepage as we couldn't properly target to our customers' needs on the homepage. Yes, we could link to the service section regarding billing for mobile contracts from the Quick Links on our homepage, but only a minor percentage of users would have a use for it there. Most of them have a use for it on the category page.
We just implemented the Quick links. I think it's unclear that the mobile version is a carrousel with the possibility to swipe, despite the small view of the third tile.





Vision carrousel


At mobile, you only see the first 2 tiles. There is a progress bar the first time, but it disappears to quickly and you don't see it when you haven't tapped the screen yet.





I'm curious about the CTR per tile of other Communities! Feel free to share your results 🙂





Is there a possibility to implement a better progress bar or use another navigational element?






We're planning to increase the width of a single card to make it more readable:





We're keen on the carrousel interaction as we believe it's a common mobile UI browsing and scrolling pattern. We may want to make it more visible how many quick-links there are, we've received more feedback on this 🙂
@MaryJ We implemented a visual improvement to make the quick links more readable on smaller viewports 🙂