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Upcoming and latest help center article editor UI enhancements



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Katarzyna Karpinska

Zendesk Product Manager

Edited Sep 26, 2024


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24 comments

Good to see the article editor is getting some attention. I'm hoping the following ideas have been considered for the article editor UI enhancements:

- Buttons to insert tabs/accordions/buttons (rather than having to code them in manually)
- Collaborative working (supporting multiple users in the document at once)
- Image support for content blocks
- A table of contents generator
- An easier way to create article templates
- Better alignment between editing view and preview/published views

EDIT: the ability to add inline comments when an article in in progress would also be very beneficial.

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100% agree with Zoe Goble

 

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"- An easier way to create article templates"

 

This would be a huge plus for users like myself who post 50+ individual documents at a time and have to continually set fields such as

Managed By

Visible to

Publish in section

"open for comments" checkbox

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Dan Cooper

Community Moderator

Will these changes also include API level access?  Some areas like the ability to read/set the owner, template, and team publishing status still don't seem to be available via the API.  Some of the gaps around collaboration are more on the notification front and it would be nice to be able to pull a list of tickets where the review status is "Ready for Review" and notify the respective owners in an external tool of our choice. 

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Shawna James

Community Product Feedback Specialist

Hey Dan, thank you so much for taking the time to provide us with your feedback here. I wanted to point you in the direction of our product feedback forum for Guide where we collect product feedback and where our PM’s customers feedback. We would greatly appreciate you using this forum to share your feedback with us for better visibility.  Here is our product feedback template to get you started. Thank you!

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Also 100% agree with Zoe Goble!

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Katarzyna Karpinska

Zendesk Product Manager

Hi Zoe Goble,

Yes, quite a few the request are on our UI roadmap. As for images in content blocks, they've been supported for quite a while now :) 

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Katarzyna Karpinska

Zendesk Product Manager

Dan Cooper,

I hear you, but API integrations are not in scope of this work. We'll have a separate workstream for those, sometime in the future. 

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I completely agree with Zoe Goble

It's good that you're focusing on the article editor, but I believe the most urgent features for teams with technical writers are not enhancements to the UI of the article editor. Instead, the priority should be adding missing features that are crucial for creating effective articles with minimal effort (such as accordions, tabs, buttons, and a table of contents generator). Personally, I don't see why the UI was prioritized over these features, as the latter would save teams significantly more time, in my opinion.

9


I am happy to see Guide is not dead! Thank you! ♥

 

We are looking forward to every improvement, and there is so much to be done which can be seen above. Hope we can also get that Article comments report one day :)

3


I would love to view this video, however there is no external link and when making full screen the quality is awful. 

1


Glad that improvements to the guide editor are on your radar! A flag: in the video, I'm not seeing the option to assign guides. We use this feature to note who's saved updates to a guide when it has unpublished changes. That way if one writer goes in and sees it's assigned to someone else, they can reach out to them to discuss the changes / how long it'll be till the update is published, etc.

Without the visibility of the Assign feature I'm worried we'll publish over saved changes without realizing.

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Katarzyna Karpinska

Zendesk Product Manager

Hi Katie Arathoon

You are way ahead of us :) The assignment link will change it's place, but it wont' be removed. If you pay attention to the mock-ups you can find it in the line above article title. When we get to making this change we'll introduce it here as well.

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A lot of my work is done remotely, so I use a laptop almost exclusively on the go. 

I would like to suggest that the Header Section be moved not to be locked or float smaller near the top of the Editor to maximize screen space? This would be great and thanks! 

5


totally agree with Uriah - allowing greater screen real estate for writing by floating the header section would be really good!!! 

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Especially now that the tool bar at the foot of the page takes up vertical space - there is now even less screen real estate to use for editing....

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Completely agree with Camilla's comment. While it's very nice that you are addressing the article editor, the UI wasn't the problem with it. As Camilla mentions, it's missing features like

- easily adding Accordions and ToC are what is causing our team to use more time on finishing articles.

In the same vein, we're also missing a feature to easily add lightboxes to images, as we have to enter the source code every time.

And text editor features like rich text editor.

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In addition to the Templates mentioned above (and YES PLEASE to those), having the ability to change the default settings would be a real life saver. For example, we never allow comments, but have to remember to un-check that option for every single article. It's a real pain!

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Having this "Collaborative working (supporting multiple users in the document at once)" from Zoe's first post would be game-changing. 

We first draft all articles in Google Docs. After SME review and comments, we copy the content to Guide and reformat it (this is now easier with new Zendesk updates).

We also agree the UI wasn't really that bad. There are just so many features missing. We had to purchase an entirely separate tool to get basic features like find and replace in HTML and across multiple articles. 

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Hello, I don't understand these changes with the footer, we don't need the space on the right anyway so why not keep using it to put all the buttons? Right now with the footer, we're losing a lot of space and on a small laptop screen, you only see a few lines of the article (see screenshot, it's not better on a large screen). There's definitely a UI issue with the fixed section of the title, the big footer, etc. We're working every day in the tool and our daily work is impacted.

 Thanks!

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Cécile Luft is very correct. Y'all have made changes to ensure that there is space wasted by toolbars on all four sides of the editor. That is truly insane, and an unbelievable waste of space. Seriously, can y'all pick a side or two, and move all the buttons to one place? Your product team must either never use a laptop, or never write articles... Some of us have to do both of those on a daily basis.

I mean, look at this: (And yes, I know you can collapse the side bar, but even then, it's using up a bar. You have 3 other sides to move those buttons on the bottom to. Please do so.

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Heather Rommel

Zendesk LuminaryThe Product Manager Whisperer - 2021Community Moderator

Are there any plans to allow us to do private notes on an article for reviewers and editors? We want to talk to each other without publishing that to the HC on a live article.

Also wondering about linking a Zendesk ticket to an article. A field on the side bar would be fine; where we can note what ticket(s) caused us to create this article. This way reviewers have a source place to understand context. 

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I am trying to find out how we would activate this button, it doesn't appear in our Guide.

 

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Jennifer Rowe

Zendesk Documentation Team

Hi Darren Bell!

That feature is part of Team Publishing and it's available on Enterprise plans.
Hope that helps! 

 

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