Help us make SmugMug's Help Center better!

Ben

Hey all you lovely Dgrinners!

We are working on rebuilding our entire Help Center to make it much easier to find answers to your most burning SmugMug questions. There's a lot we can, and will, do ourselves. Design, writing, building, etc. The biggest problem though is organizing the information. As people who work at SmugMug, we get blinders by being too familiar with all the content. Does an article about colorspace belong in Uploading related topics, or does it belong in topics about selling prints?

If you want to help us out, it should be quick and painless. It is an exercise called "card sorting". Basically we throw the title of various articles on cards, and you drag them onto the category that makes the most sense to you. There are a few dozen cards, and 8 categories right now (though you can create your own category if nothing makes sense). Don't overthink it, just drag it where it makes sense!

I'd guess it would take 5 or maybe 10 minutes, and would help us out immensely. Totally voluntary, some of you might find it really fascinating to see how Information Architecture gets built. :thumb

The Card Sorting starts here:
http://ows.io/os/2o1a7n5g

Thanks! Love you all! :lust
-Ben

AceCo55

Done - only takes a few minutes

puzzledpaul

Curious to see the categories, and considered helping, but fell at the first hurdle because I don't have an account...

pp

agallia

Done!

Ben

Thanks everyone! The more responses, the easier it is to make sure everything lives where it should.

puzzledpaul: Yeah, I realized shortly after making this survey that I should have added another category to the Account question. It wouldn't let me add it then.

If you do want to help still, just choose Basic and go from there! Thanks!

phaserbeam

Done...

Lille Ulven

Done too
Nice idea of getting us involved

Ben

Thanks again all!

I have over 30 responses so far, which is super awesome! I'll probably leave it running over the weekend, and close it on Monday and share some results.

This should make our help pages so much easier to navigate.

clongwor

Make help center readable
The light gray and light green skinny fonts on the help pages are hard to read. I suppose some people might find it aesthetically pleasing, but people look on help pages for basic, readable information, not pretty colors.
Just wait till you guys get older!:):

Ben wrote: »

Hey all you lovely Dgrinners!

We are working on rebuilding our entire Help Center to make it much easier to find answers to your most burning SmugMug questions. There's a lot we can, and will, do ourselves. Design, writing, building, etc. The biggest problem though is organizing the information. As people who work at SmugMug, we get blinders by being too familiar with all the content. Does an article about colorspace belong in Uploading related topics, or does it belong in topics about selling prints?

If you want to help us out, it should be quick and painless. It is an exercise called "card sorting". Basically we throw the title of various articles on cards, and you drag them onto the category that makes the most sense to you. There are a few dozen cards, and 8 categories right now (though you can create your own category if nothing makes sense). Don't overthink it, just drag it where it makes sense!

I'd guess it would take 5 or maybe 10 minutes, and would help us out immensely. Totally voluntary, some of you might find it really fascinating to see how Information Architecture gets built.

The Card Sorting starts here:
http://ows.io/os/2o1a7n5g

Thanks! Love you all!
-Ben

ChancyRat

Done. A bit of feedback: I had trouble with the major categories, in that I found I wanted to split some of them into other major categories. Then I had trouble choosing which category each topic went into, because there is significant overlap in many cases. That told me that less important than setting up categories and content titles in them, is a keyword index and search function. I'd like to be able to type "moving content blocks onto your site" into a search field and find helpful content in both "new to smugmug" and "customizing your site". Or I'd like to type "content blocks" and find 50 pages to read through.

Ben

Excellent feedback ChancyRat. We actually have some cool new search technology we are going to be able to use on the new Help Center, which should definitely improve search. Searching in general is a very very hard problem, even in a closed environment. So while I am working on improving search, and it will be a very prominent navigation method on the new Help Center, I also want to make sure that people can find what they want without it.

The categories are interesting in general. I was worried that people would be faced with too much decision anxiety if I didn't create a few "default" categories, but pretty quickly customers have pointed out how my categories don't line up as neatly with their expectations as we would like. I guess that is why we test instead of just assuming we know. The group that is most common so far actually deletes a few of my categories, and adds a few more. The software seems to do a pretty good job of standardizing based on what cards are put together, regardless of what the category is called. Then it tries to suggest a better category name based on the ones created.

I am planning to turn off the survey sometime tomorrow, and then I will share some data from it.

Thanks for participating!