Topic helpfulness: now previewing on inSpired

Topic helpfulness: now previewing on inSpired
At inSided we want to help you understand the value of your community. We are developing a feature that gives more insight into which Q&A topics in your community are considered helpful and which are not. Next to that we were inspired by the post: Demonstrate and drive community value by enabling public likes in our community.





Today we rolled this beta feature as a preview out inSpired, we call it Topic Helpfulness.





What is Topic helpfulness?

A little area below the opening post where users can indicate if they found the topic helpful or not.





How does Topic helpfulness work?

Every Q&A topic (questions and questions that have a best answer marked) of your community will get a new little area below the opening post asking one simple question: “Did this topic help you find an answer to your question?”. Users can reply via a ‘Yes’ or ‘No’ to indicate whether or not it has helped them.





This data/event will then be directly logged into your Google analytics, giving you clear view on which topics/content are helping people the most. Because it is a beta version the data is not visible in the Control environment yet. We have plans to make the data available in the content dashboard at a later stage.





A few points:




  1. This is available to ALL users, both logged in and anonymous users

  2. It’s available in every Q&A topic and is logged separately per topic

  3. The response (Yes or No) is only visible to the user, e.g. only he/she will see what response they have given to the topic



Pilot customers needed

Before we're making this feature publicly available to all branded communities we want to run a short pilot program with 1 or 2 of our customers.





The pilot program is simple: we'll activate topic helpfulness on your community and start measuring data. Data will be sent to your Google Analytics and is visible from day one. After a while we'll discuss results, thoughts and feedback.





Interested in becoming a pilot customer for topic helpfulness? Please contact me via a Private Message.





We will keep you posted here on inSpired on improvements and new milestones, if you have any questions or feedback let us know.
Great news! 🙂
@ErikT, @Florian , @bjoern_schulze, @Sivan, @Stéphan Lam : I think this would be very interesting for you as well😃
@ErikT, @Florian , @bjoern_schulze, @Sivan, @Stéphan Lam : I think this would be very interesting for you as well😃





Great news! This feature will really help us find and improve existing topics. 😃
Nice!
This is great!
Great to see your first responses, thanks for reaching out to us to join the pilot program. I'll contact you via PM in the following days to discuss the details 🙂
Very cool! Can the text be changed? Rather than the topic itself being helpful, I'm interested in knowing if the marked answer was helpful.
This is great news! We've always wished we had a community 'helpfulness' metric similar to how we report on our knowledge base.
Oh, and can it be moved to be part of the topic post? At the moment it has the size and position of an advertising bar, that most people ignore.
Oh, and can it be moved to be part of the topic post? At the moment it has the size and position of an advertising bar, that most people ignore.





Interesting point Ditte. I have to admit that having just opened this topic three times in the last few minutes, my brain 'skipped' the new voting section every time. Only just went back up and noticed the buttons.
And one more comment and I'll stop spamming this thread. 😃





Was just chatting with Ditte about this, and I'm not sure I would want this feature limited to topics that are marked as 'questions' / Q&As. The reader of the topic is the one that has a question in this case, and I think there's a chance that the reader will find an 'answer' within a topic that wasn't originally marked as a question. I'd probably prefer to have these helpfulness buttons on all topics, Just a thought.
Thanks for your feedback @Kenneth Refsgaard and @Ditte





The text is fully customisable (via phrase tool). For now the position is fixed, we first want to analyse some data to see wether people see the element and interact with it before we make changes to that.





We have plans to make it more configurable in the future, so that you can determine per category (or even per topic) wether you want to enable or disable topic helpfulness (much like 'Allow comments' which can be configured on a category and topic level)
Nice feature!





I agree with Kenneth as well, my brain skipped the part of the Yes/No. Maybe make it more stand out?
Nice feature and looking forward to pilot it!





However, I also do have hesitations regarding the validity of the numbers we will get back:




  • The question "was this helpful" will be displayed for all Q&A (@yoeri: correct me if I understood wrong from our conversation)

  • Our community is 90-95% issues of users

  • We currently have a solution rate of 27%

  • So a user coming to a topic from Google (80%), the question "was this topic helpful?" does not make any sense in 73% of the time as he only sees an issue, but no solution (and yes, I expect s/he will not spend time to scroll through the thread, identify the solution and go up again to vote...)

  • So my expectation will be that for our pilot we'll get a very high proportion of "No"



So before going live, IMO it must be possible to limit the "Helpful-Question" to only´Q&A that contain a solution/best answer.





Taking it a step further:




  • At a post level, the question "was this helpful" will always make sense, because the context is the single post

  • This opens up the opportunity to tackle the solution rate bottleneck with help of public helpful votes



The ideal helpful-flow would look like:




  1. As long as no solution/best answer is identified, only at post level the "Helpful-question" is displayed.

  2. Through helpful-voting (threshold=configurable), a most helpful answer is identified

  3. As soon as it is identified, it's shown as most helpful embedded in the question (like a marked solution) and the the "Helpful-Question" is displayed at a topic level

  4. Through topic-level helpful-voting Q&As gain weight for search etc.



Cheers,


Florian
I like this effort, however: some communities use an external solution to ask if a page was useful. So this feature should be (edit: would be better if) optional.





Besides that, I mostly agree with Florians comments.





I’ve always liked Apple Community’s approach to lowering the threshold to provide feedback:


- An ‘I have this question too’ button below the question


- A ‘Helpful’ button below each response








https://discussions.apple.com/thread/8544640
Going off-topic a bit, but I think this video about Reddit versus YouTube's commenting system is interesting:






Nice insights, thanks Jurgen!
We just deployed some improvements to Topic Helpfulness, read all about it here: https://community.insided.com/news-platform-updates-16/topic-helpfulness-v2-0-1139
We have plans to make it more configurable in the future, so that you can determine per category (or even per topic) wether you want to enable or disable topic helpfulness (much like 'Allow comments' which can be configured on a category and topic level)





That would be great. First priority would be (in my opinion) the articles. The smileys are very distracting there. Most of the time the article does not contain questions, so it would be great if we can disable it there.
@Yoeri Could we use different emojis to try an drive the right behaviour off the back of this great feature?





I.e rather than smileys, which make people thinks its more sentiment, could you have a thumbs up, shoulder shrug and thumbs down.......?





Was this topic helpful, did it answer your question?





👍🏻 🤷🏼 👎🏻
A different set of emoji was requested here as well. We're happy to see that this feature does its work. We don't have short term plans to work on different emoji for content helpfulness, we do have plans to add the content helpfulness feature inside our Embeddable widget. When we'll work on this we might update the look and feel of the existing three emoji, but the faces will stay in place.





We have considered adding multiple emoji sets in the configuration options whilst developing this feature (so that you could pick the set that fits your need). This hasn't been developed due the lack of evidence that this was really needed. Our research concluded that the existing 3 emoji were a good fit (and universally accepted as a way to give feedback).

Hi @Yoeri and co, 

 

Is there anyway to export ‘Topic helpfulness' data? The only mention of it that I can find (I think), is the ‘score’ in the ‘Content Dashboard’, ‘Popular topics’ section…...


Hey,

We push ‘Topic helpfulness’ data to Google Analytics from which you can generate exports (.csv / .pdf). See Where can I see the results in this article for more information: