Tag all the things!

Goal: Increase the number of products being tagged in the Spiceworks Community topic replies.

Team: Worked with the Community PM, developer and data science team members to brainstorm solutions for improving the tagging system within the forums as well as optimizations the team could make to the databases to make them easier to work with. Here are some of the solutions we came up with.

My role: Research, UI and interaction design

Tools: Sketch, Principle, Invision

Metrics: Increase in products and vendors being tagged (members); increase in traffic to product pages from topic pages (guests)

Through research in the Spiceworks community, we found that IT pros were mentioning products, vendors and other IT pros when answering questions within the forums, but not utilizing the existing tagging system. Tagging a product or vendor in a reply creates a link back to the product or vendor page within Spiceworks for the IT pro to then continue research on the product or vendor, but also allows tech marketers within the community to follow conversations around the products they represent and be able to contribute to the discussion. Tagging another user gives them a notification that you are trying to bring them into the conversation or responding to something they have already said previously in the thread.

Challenges

• The current tagging system is searching large, separate databases for products, vendors and users. So the search function can lag quite a bit as the IT pro types the resource they’re looking to tag.

• IT pros aren’t aware of the inline shortcut they can use, typing “+” before the resource they’re trying to tag. Rather than the more common “@”.

• Working within a complex and dated system that has many layers and dependencies.

UI Updates

To make it clear that you could tag resource inline as you type we moved the tagging field into the reply field. Along with updated copy IT pros better understood that they can trigger the tagging system as they type instead tagging things after they write up their reply.

Tagging Function

During discussions the developer and PM about how to handle triggering the quick search while typing without affecting load time while searching the databases in real-time, we decided our best option was to use two different triggers for the quick search. We’d use the more common “@” for tagging another IT pro and “+” for tagging a product or vendor. This way the system will know what is being searched, helping to improve the response time as the IT pro types.

Suggested Tagging

One thing that came up over and over was that many forum users simply didn’t think to tag products they mentioned in their replies. During on discussion we came up with the idea to scan the users’ reply as they typed. When the user pauses in typing, the system scan the reply for keywords or phrases that might be a product, vendor or user that can be tagged highlighting them in yellow. The tagging field at the bottom of the reply box also highlights in yellow to draw the users’ attention. The user can then decide whether they want to tag these items by selecting “Yes” or “No” from the tagging field prompt. Selecting “Yes” engages them into a tagging flow, “No” dismisses the prompt.

Results

The updates to the tagging system are in production and usage shows an increase in users finding and using the feature per post and reply.

Based on some feedback from users and experiments run within the Community, it was decided that the auto-tagging feature was a bit too heavy-handed for our audience and was therefore scrapped.