With the launch of Colored Text, a highly requested feature from our customers, the Community Team sat down with Amisha Sharma to discuss what went into building this functionality.

Can you share the story behind the colored text functionality that you and your team have been working on?

Color text has been a much awaited feature by our customers. We are happy to announce that we are now releasing color picker, which will provide the ability to change the color of the text in Agent Workspace. The color picker provides 14 distinct colors to choose from. Below is everything agents will be able to do with this feature:

• Pick the color of the text before/while writing a response for the customers.
• Change the color of the text by highlighting the text and picking the desired color.
• Copy colored text and retain the colors when pasting it into the editor. Copy and paste will work even if the copied color is not provided in the color picker. (Actively supported sources: Google Docs, MS Word, Gmail, One Note, Google Sheets)
• Apply rich text formatting to colored text or change the color of formatted text

What sort of customer feedback were you getting that demonstrated the need for these enhancements?

This feature was being actively requested by our customers, through our customers success team and through Zendesk community posts. We actively monitored the feature request thread and read through all of their use cases. For example:

• Our customers need a way to highlight important information in their response to their customers and that’s why they need the ability to change the color of the text.
• Copying colored text from different sources and retaining the colors when pasting into the editor is critical to retain the formatting around important information.
• Changing the color of the text or picking a color before typing a response will help put across their message in the best possible way.
• Applying rich-text formatting to colored text or changing the color of already-formatted text adds to the rich text formatting options provided by Zendesk.

Our customers wanted the ability to make important information stand out and now they have what they were waiting for! 

What can you tell us about the customers that were most affected by this limitation?

The customers wanted a way to make important information stand out in their content for their users, but were unable to add any color to their response as we did not provide them a way to do this. They were making use of the rich text formatting options like bold, italics and underline to format their content the best they could. Color text was a major need and we are glad we are able to deliver now.

Were you getting feedback on this from the Community?

This feature was being actively requested by our customers, through Zendesk community posts, constituting over 85 comments and 59 upvotes.

How long of a process was it to build and implement the color picker?

It took us a little more time to implement this feature as we had a few other high priority items come up. My team’s main goal is to provide the best editing and composing experience possible and we were immersed in making our composers more stable and reliable. But, once we actively started working on this feature, it was a month long road to deliver.

Once you’d decided to build colored text functionality into the product, what was the biggest challenge you faced?

The biggest challenge was to include all possible different accessible colors in the color picker which can provide a good experience for both our customers and end users. We went back and forth between which colors to provide in the color picker as we wanted to expand the palette as much as possible.

Is there anything you would like our users to know before working with those new functionalities?

Below are the steps to access the color picker:

1. Open a ticket.
2. Open the text formatting toolbar at the bottom of the composer.
3. Click on the “Text color” icon to access the color picker

Alternatively, you can also use the keyboard shortcut to access the color picker: Cmd + Shift + Y

You can resize the composer to view the color picker and the text you’re typing simultaneously. To resize the composer, drag the top of the composer.

In order to receive colored text responses from your customers, make sure to enable “Rich content in email” setting. You can find this setting by going to Settings -> Channels -> Email.

Accessibility: We are only providing accessible colors in the color picker. Every color will have a tooltip to provide a good experience to screen readers. The color picker is completely keyboard accessible.

There are a few known limitations of this feature: 

• The bullet points/number lists do not change color at this time. The color is only applied to text.
• Color text cannot be applied inside code block or code span.

Additional Comments:

Please let us know by commenting on this post if you are using this feature and if there is anything we can improve in your experience. We can’t wait to hear from you!