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Unfollow vs Following šŸ¤”



Posted Jul 06, 2022

Would love Zendesk to reconsider the native terminology for follow buttons. 

When you choose if you want to follow a post on Community/Gather  (or if you are following by default after engaging on that post), the options show as 'Follow' and 'Unfollow'. So button label tells you what action you will take by clicking on it 

However, on a Topic, it shows as 'Follow' and 'Following'. So in this situation, the first state describes an action the button takes and the second indicates the current state and you have to click on it to then see a dropdown of an action. This is making things confusing for customers as they can't see at a glance that they can reactively unfollow when they no longer want notifications, as they can with posts.

Also according to Zendesk's own documentation* this should be behaving exactly as we want it to:

https://developer.zendesk.com/documentation/help_center/help-center-templates/helpers/#subscribe-helper

*the example given is for the article page which does have the button text as 'unfollow' however this is the exact same handlebar with no optional parameters and it behaves differently on the topic page giving the 'following' output text. Zendesk should fix this or document the expected outcome of using this handlebar.

We've looked at doing some customer development over the top of this because we've had explicit feedback from our customers that this is confusing. Still, we'd need to make a change to the button when the page loads to say 'yep this is a button and the user is following, change the message to unfollow' and secondly intercept when the button is clicked and make the same change. 

Even doing the first on-page load isn't as easy as it sounds due to when Zendesk JavaScript runs to dictate the state of that button. 

Does anyone have any advice on this or is this something Zendesk would look at changing?


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Hi Daniel - 
 
Thanks for this detailed feedback!

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