Since not all of our company’s customers have direct access to a live support channel (due to different pricing packages) I wanted to make sure that the help articles that all customers have access to are helpful for them. I needed more detailed feedback than just the “Was this article helpful?” yes/no buttons.

Hotjar's polls are the little popups at the bottom of your screen that can ask any question you want, and you can also add logic to show other questions based on the responses.

We are using Hotjar for our company website, so I was able to easily install it to our help center and verify that it was working. Once it's installed, you need to remove the voting options from the articles template and then create your poll.

Disable the Article Voting

The next step is to remove the voting options from every article. Go to Customize Design (the eyeball in the left menu) > View Theme > Edit Code > Then click on the “article_page.hbs” template.

Add “{{!--” and “--}}” around the block of code that includes the div class “article-votes”, then publish the code.

Create a Poll in Hotjar

Next you can create a new poll in Hotjar. (You can do something similar with other services, but some specific options may vary.) Many of these settings, like color, will be your personal preference, but there are three main settings to pay attention to:

1. Targeting

For this, you can decide what devices you want to target, but to make sure the poll only shows up on the article pages, make sure that "On pages I specify" is selected, and choose "URL starts with" as the operator and enter your help center domain with "/hc/en-us/articles" as the URL. (Make sure to change the language and country info if you need to.)

You probably could also use "URL contains" and just "/hc/en-us/articles/" to get the same results.

2. Questions

You will set the questions you want to ask in the "Questions" section. Here's the basic outline I used and where I added in some logic:

1. Was this article useful? (Yes/No)
2. What feedback do you have for this specific article? (Options below)

• It is missing information.
• The information is inaccurate/out of date.
• It doesn’t explain my use case.
• Images weren’t helpful.
• Other (Please give more detail)
• (They would then be taken to another question asking for more details based on their answer in #2.)
• Any additional feedback

Click on the green signpost button to add any logic based on how they respond. For the first question ("Was this article useful?"), I set it so if they answered "Yes" they were directed to give any more feedback, then to the thank you message. If they answered "No" they were directed to the next question:

For the second question, I created another text response question for each of the options to get more details on that specific response, and I set up the logic to direct them accordingly:

3. Behavior

These settings are also more your personal preference. I set the poll to launch when the user scrolled through half of the article so I knew they had at least skimmed most of it, and I set it so it would always show the poll, even if they had already responded on a different article.

Using the Results

You can export your data as a CSV or just read through the responses in Hotjar to look for any trends or fix any articles that need attention. Not every respondent has filled out all of the questions, but even if they only get to question 2 it does still give a general idea of which articles might need attention and what issues to look for.

Other Uses

You can use the similar page targeting logic to get feedback on other pages. For instance, I created another poll that targets URLs starting with “https://help.grow.com/hc/en-us/search” to get feedback on search results and more detail on what they were looking for when they tried their search term.