make help info easier to find and use

[katska]

bring together information from FAQ, canned responses that are specifically about the website to begin with into a searchable resource.

[katska]

trying out Zendesk for this

[katska]

Have copied some canned responses to https://docs.google.com/document/d/19T3gsKGefMs9-lGzIyhCloarjCxi7IRYSYietOElFkE/edit#

Using the Website Search for an Address Find a Specific Address When Something’s Wrong Broken Link More Info* Google address is wrong Bad-Geocoding Geocoding is wrong Council Provided Bad Data* Sign Up for, Manage and unsubscribe from Alerts Sign Up for An Alert Change Email Alert Email Address Unsubscribe to change email address How Do I Unsubscribe? Making Comments Comments where do they go? Not the Gov or Builders When People Send Accidental Emails Emailed OAF Not Commented OOPS PA SEND* Email/Confirm*

Doing that was helpful to see categories emerging from the kinds of questions I find I'm answering a lot. However they might not be the categories someone looking for information would necessarily look for, so making these easy to find is another piece of work to investigate.

[katska]

I put some of these in Zendesk, which seems like it's a giant thing and we only need a fraction of their functionality.

In search of a simpler more elegant answer, I came across helpcenter.io at https://userguiding.com/blog/help-center-software/ It's only help centre, not all the user agent stuff - but also not community led help. I'm not sure how much we need that at this point either. It's not something we have now. And the focus is on consolidating what we have not starting a whole new approach. Maybe in another year we'll want that?

Straight away it's pretty easy to copy and paste information there. There are categories, but not tags.

[katska]

I'd like to get everything in one place, and overhaul the content

I added everything that's in the document mentioned above to planningalerts.helpcenter.io. as an 'article' Also added what's currently in the FAQ page(with very only minor wording changes on Can I have the data) as FAQ entries WI haven't added yet (from frontapp)

• abuse report responses
• some others...
• new content on privacy, partly because there are changes that need to be implemented elsewhere, as we refer to instructions we aim to give to councils but have not incorporated that yet.
• a bunch of the identified reasons why people get in touch from Jo's exploration of our inbox that don't currently have canned responses for what ever reason see google doc and this as yet unpublished blog post on the research (only OAF people can read both right now, you can ask me for access here if you are interested) I think the next step for the last category is to find my previous responses for those kinds of questions, adapting individual responses for help centre content, and decide where the source of truth list should then be for these from now on. Do I put them straight into helpcenter?

Also some of the queries involve some research on my part where I check through a few different options (for example when someone hasn't received an alert for a while). We give guidance to help trouble shoot, so that by the time they get in touch with us they've ruled out some common mistakes at their end and know which information to send to help us give an efficient and useful response. But I do wonder how much people will take that on. Interesting challenge! It seems like the kind of query where a community forum might start to make sense to answer council specific problems for instance.

[katska]

looking at the content on a phone, the categories take up a lot of screen, would be nice to have options around this. @mlandauer I'm keen to hear what you think.

[katska]

Also is there other content on the website that we want to move to a help centre?

[mlandauer]

Related to #1684

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