How Answerly Search can Improve your Dashboard's User Experience
search widget 10/09/2021
Today's dashboards are messy. After you sign up and log in to a dashboard, you are immediately greeted with a welcome message, a modal to enter your credit card details, and a call to action button to "get into it" – all of this happening on the same screen.
Though, this blog post will not be about how lousy onboarding can lead to conversion decline. Instead, we will talk about the UI problems after the onboarding and how to solve them and improve your dashboard's user experience with Answerly Search.
The Problem
John Doe signs up for Acme INC – a collaborative workspace platform for small businesses. After John finishes setting up and white labeling the account for his company, he finds himself stuck. For his life, John can't figure out how to invite team members to the platform – he tries all entries in the menu, goes to every page, but the invite button is just invisible to him.
The (Current) Solution
Many businesses tackle this issue in various ways. The most common tackle is simply making the invite button visible. But apart from that, there's having a knowledge base webpage where you display well-written and categorized answers about your services and a helpdesk widget that you can embed in your pages so users can look up these answers more quickly.
At answerly, we offer both the knowledge base platform and a helpdesk widget.
But the problem is that these solutions come with their own UIs and methods on how to find an answer, which, if you think about it, they're only adding to the ongoing frustration that John is feeling with his experience at Acme INC!
John might as well be on edge to leave Acme INC and find something else now that he figures he has to go through a support system to invite a teammate!
The Answerly Search Solution
Here at Answerly, when we were talking about situations like John's, we were thinking, why are our current solutions not as helpful in this case, and is it possible to solve bad UX for people once for all?
In our analysis of our helpdesk widget, we concluded that while, as the title suggests, "help" desk, – it is also a complex software built to serve in many different ways. For example, our helpdesk widget has a contact form; you can share the latest updates, add various components, etc.
The same logic applies to the knowledge base webpage as well, it comes with a unique UI, and on top of it, it's an entirely different URL.
Below you have a screenshot of Answerly Search showing search results and actions:
Good UX means fewer things to click or tap. And that is precisely what Answerly Search does; it takes John straight to inviting their teammates without having to figure out too much or do anything in-between! And it does this because it is only a search element with instant search results that you can embed in any area of your dashboard!
Taking it to the next level with Search Actions
When we talked about John's problem in one of our meetings with colleagues, something interesting came up. What if John doesn't have to search for a guide on inviting a teammate, but instead the "invite button" shows up in the results? - And this is how we get the idea for Search Actions!
Actions are elements inside the search results. Their anatomy consists of a title, description, and button. All actions are searchable and will display along with the answers.
You can create as many actions as you want in the Answerly dashboard, and they can either open a URL or execute javascript code!
To add to this beautiful solution, you can also create actions that display only when there are zero search results! Such actions can be for example "Contact us", or "Send a message".
My final thoughts
Being a UX expert isn't an effortless skill. However, that doesn't mean you have to hire the most expensive pro in the field to improve your dashboard's user experience. Most of the time, good UX makes the length of a process that achieves a particular goal shorter. Answerly Search is excellent at accomplishing precisely that, and it is one of the Answerly Products you can use completely free of charge.