Preview

Quicklinks are now previewing on inSpired!

Quicklinks are now previewing on inSpired!
Surprise! 🎉





Our new favorite feature, Quicklinks, is now previewing on the inSpired community! This feature is our first, bigger step towards our vision of a true self-service platform which will enable you to give your customers an experience that reaches beyond your community.





What are Quicklinks?




Quicklinks are there to guide your users to... virtually wherever you want them to be! Just a few examples:




  • That one article that you want everybody to see when they visit

  • A category which you want to highlight to everyone

  • Most viewed / searched topics, articles, FAQs

  • A PDF file (e.g. a manual)

  • Any website / url outside of the community



Basically everything that has an url!





You can decide yourself how many of these links should be presented and how they are being presented. Fully self-service. A quicklink is set up in three steps:




  1. Add your own title & description

  2. Add your url

  3. choose between image/icon/nothing to be displayed at the top



Unhappy with the order? Simply drag & drop the tiles to give it a new twist, it's that simple.





Quicklinks on the Homepage


In this example you can see a mix of different use cases for quicklinks (all are using icons btw). Two more tiles can be expanded here, should the user wish to:








If you should choose 4 quicklinks instead of six, the layout changes accordingly.





Setup in Control


Below a sneak-peak at the settings in your Control environment (final experience may vary). Next to the order of tiles, you can enable/disable the general visibility and the border options. They will be located in the new "Homepage"-settings page in your Control environment. From here you will also select and edit individual quicklinks:








FAQs




Do we have to pay to turn this feature on?


Of course not! It is standard for all branded template communities.





What happens to featured topics?


They will stay as it is. Not exactly however, we want to improve the way you use them. Stay tuned for updates on that.





When will it be released / available?


We are still brushing it off to give you the best experience. We don't want to put a deadline on this, as we want to ensure quality. But expect it very soon!





Will it be turned on automatically once you release it?


No. You have all the time you need to set it up in your Control environment, you can activate it whenever you feel ready.





Feedback




We are not just testing here, we also need your feedback. :)




  • What do you like?

  • What would you like to see different?

  • What are you missing?



We are very curious how you experience this feature. So take your chance and help shaping it!
Check it out @Hiewwaiy!
Looks good!





How many url's can you add per quicklink?





And are you able to add url's from topics that are posted in different subforums?


For example: you want to create a quicklink to all the FAQ's. However, the FAQ's are now posted in different subforums. Are you then able to gather all the FAQ's into one quicklink?
Hi,





it is now one link per Quicklink. Could you explain in which situation you would like to include multiple links?





If you would include multiple links for these FAQs, I could imagine it would be tricky:


How would a user know which of the links is the right one for his/her issue?


How would you want to display where to click?





And are you able to add url's from topics that are posted in different subforums?


For example: you want to create a quicklink to all the FAQ's. However, the FAQ's are now posted in different subforums. Are you then able to gather all the FAQ's into one quicklink?






There are multiple ways to do this:







  1. Add a tag "FAQ" (or something else) to these FAQs and link to a Tag search

  2. If possible, use a search that includes all of these FAQs (e.g. if topic title starts with FAQ then that should work just fine)

  3. Link to a central topic which includes a list of all FAQs



I personally would favour the third option, as this way you are in total control of how/which content is presented.





Cheers,





Julian
Love it - and looking forward to using this feature.





Might be useful to once deployed to have folks talk a snapshot and share what they have done on their community - could inspire others with ideas.
Hi,





Another question:





It would be great if you could add quicklinks in subforums, for instance by ''replacing'' the featured topics by quicklinks (ofcouse optional ☺️)





Use case:


We have a subforum that provides for training material. Our software contains 5 different modules. It would be great if we could add quicklinks within this subforum, enabling our customers to quickly find the content that they need (as different customers use different modules...)





Is this someting that you are investigating as well?
Hey!





I also like the idea for using quicklinks in subforums! I know that the team is thinking about something like this as well, but I think this is not on our roadmap for the upcoming months.





However we are working on something which might help you to give your users an even better experience. Check this comment by Yoeri:





We are currently working on an 'Open text' sidebar widget with HTML/CSS support. This allows you to create your own widgets from scratch. Within this widget you can create lists, links, banners and more (basically everything that is covered with HTML/CSS). You could use this widget to create a list of topics that you want to feature. We expect to have some updates on this by the end of this year.



I could imagine that a smart widget in the side bar could also help your users to select / find content specifically for their modules. As you can design them how you like it, I think this could be a very nice option too!?





Of course we will also preview this feature here as soon as possible, so that you can get a better idea of it. :)





Cheers,





Julian






We are currently working on an 'Open text' sidebar widget with HTML/CSS support. This allows you to create your own widgets from scratch. Within this widget you can create lists, links, banners and more (basically everything that is covered with HTML/CSS). You could use this widget to create a list of topics that you want to feature. We expect to have some updates on this by the end of this year.



Sounds great @Julian! Looking forward to it 👍


I like Quicklinks! I think it will be very beneficial to be able to link to any URL. I also like that it will be possible to fully control, title, description and image. For "featured_home" it's good to have it pulled automatically, but for Quicklinks it's great that it will be configurable.





What I'm really missing is this feature to be available in subforums. "Featured_subforum" is only able to feature content from the same subforum, so right now it's not possible to crosspromote any content. A subforum usually revolves around a certain product of the company, so the subforum overview page is the perfect place to be able to promote external URLs (e.g. to product tutorials) or to feature a news article about that product.


Quicklinks would be perfect for that - and I would argue the benefit would even be greater than on the homepage because on the homepage we can feature content from different subforums already.
I have an improvement request:





There doesn't seem to be an anchor tag and/or title attribute in the source code of the Quicklinks. I see a few potential issues with that.





1.) The web accessibility (for people with disabilities) could be limited when there aren't anchor tags and/or title attributes so that accessibility tools cannot properly recognize a link, title and/or description.





2.) You can usually hover over a link and you will see a preview of the URL in the bottom left of the browser window. This URL preview can be used to determine if a URL a user is about to click is legit / trustable. Hovering over any element of the Quicklinks doesn't give me a URL preview.





3.) (minor) SEO.





Example:


code:
This link will have a URL preview and will be recognized by an accessibility tool.

Love it - and looking forward to using this feature.





Might be useful to once deployed to have folks talk a snapshot and share what they have done on their community - could inspire others with ideas.






Snapshot of Huawei Community:






I have an improvement request:





Great feedback, thanks for sharing. We're going to improve the points that you mentioned 🙂
We've added anchor tags to the quick link cards and now show a preview of the link in the bottom left corner on hover 🙂
We deployed this feature to your communities today, read more on it here: https://community.insided.com/news-platform-updates-16/quick-links-are-here-1168





Want to get started right away, check the How to: https://community.insided.com/how-to-s-37/how-to-set-up-quick-links-on-your-homepage-1170
I also like the idea for using quicklinks in subforums! I know that the team is thinking about something like this as well, but I think this is not on our roadmap for the upcoming months.








Hi @Julian,


We'd also love to use quicklinks on our subforums. We were wondering if there is any news on the idea or perhaps other possibilities that are available now (that weren't at the time of this post).





Best,


Celine
We are working on adding these, just defining the top priorities that we want customers to get quick access to.





Keep sharing screenshots of your communities, as this helps everyone with ideas!!





Darran
@OVOdarran here's ours 🙂





As I assume that your Finnish might be a bit rusty, here's explanations ;)





From the top left:





Tervetuloa OmaYhteisöön! - "Welcome to our community!" This is a permanent quick link, welcoming new users and directing them to an introductory topic here





Matkaviestintäverkon kuuluvuus - "Mobile network coverage" This is an article by our team, assisting customers with network stuff (we are a telco 😉 )





Uusi täällä? - New here? - quite self-explanatory I guess 😉 This is a permanent quick link, 5 tips on how to use our community, here.





Elisa Viihde älytelevisiossa - Elisa Viihde on your smart tv. This is promoting an on-going beta test in our community 🙂 This is linked to the beta test category





Auta muita! - Help others! This is a permanent one, linking to unanswered questions.





Vinkki vitonen - Tip! This is an article by our moderator, giving out tips on how to read our invoices etc.





If there are several things we want to highlight, we might remove one of the permanent quick links and replace with a temporary one 🙂





We've also changed the temporary ones quite frequently :)











I'm also curious to see others, please share your screen caps 🙂
Super helpful, thanks @Suvi Lehtovaara !!





And yes, my finnish, is very rusty......so thanks for the translation!! 😂
Thanks a lot for sharing this, Suvi! I really like the mix of support & activating content!





We'd also love to use quicklinks on our subforums. We were wondering if there is any news on the idea or perhaps other possibilities that are available now (that weren't at the time of this post).


Hi @Celine_CB,





unfortunately I do not have a real update on this... 😞 I know my colleagues liked the idea but there is no commitment yet as to if & when this would be realized.





However, there has been an idea submitted regarding this (link), I would recommend you to upvote it and maybe leave a comment about what you want to achieve with this. We will review all open ideas soon, so there will be another update from the product team in this idea.





There has been one improvement in the meantime which you might not be aware of: Category recommendations. With category recommendations you can feature content from other categories of your community inside a category homepage:











Of course the limitation here is that you cannot add links to other websites, it has to be content from the community: