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Help panel: Prompt users of help panel search to ask a question instead when they get unhelpful/no search results
Open, Needs TriagePublic

Description

Problem

Per T229080, less than half of users who run a search in the help panel click on a result.
This indicates a problem that the search results being found are not considered by users to be of relevant help to them.

Proposed solution

One way to solve this problem is to make search results better, both by improving help content that is available, and also the search mechanism to find relevant results.
The proposed solution in this task is a smaller intervention to add a prompt after a search is run that prompts the user to ask for the help they want instead if no relevant results are found.
Something to the effect of:
No helpful results? Try asking the Help desk/your mentor instead! with a CTA to open either ask helpdesk / mentor UI.

Pros of this proposal:

  • Lighter-weight short term solution than trying to improve search results
  • Potentially also leads to more question-asking (another goal of the help panel improvements)
  • Seeing what questions are asked from this path can help answer what kinds of help users are searching for in this search field.

This task is essentially the inverse of T209327.

Event Timeline

MMiller_WMF renamed this task from Help panel: Prompt users of help panel search to to ask a question instead when they get unhelpful/no search results to Help panel: Prompt users of help panel search to ask a question instead when they get unhelpful/no search results.Sep 11 2019, 1:01 AM

Removing task assignee due to inactivity, as this open task has been assigned for more than two years. See the email sent to the task assignee on February 06th 2022 (and T295729).

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