The Guardian digital’s userhelp team, based in our London office, is the first point of contact for users requiring assistance with the Guardian website and native apps. The variety of queries that have poured into the Userhelp inbox has varied enormously over time, mirroring the fast pace of technological change that has occurred over the past few years.
As mobile web browsing overtakes desktop for the first time, the focus of the questions sent in to userhelp has shifted accordingly. Users ask for more help to access content on their mobile devices, and maintain accessibility while on the move. A user is as likely to be asking about offline downloads while they read the Guardian app on their commute, as they are to ask about the whereabouts of that day’s crossword on their desktop computer.
For many years the userhelp team used to sit alongside editorial colleagues, one floor below the digital development team, meaning that we were physically removed from the day to day hustle and bustle of the developers and testing team. After taking the decision to integrate more closely, and move to the same floor, in November 2015, our working practices changed. Our proximity to developers has meant that download failures, bugs and glitches reported by our users can be speedily communicated on to the relevant team. Once a user has emailed or tweeted to ask for help, we can now access our devices test bench to check whether or not that day’s ipad daily edition has downloaded, or that images are rendering correctly within the latest version of the android app. If there is a problem, we can notify the relevant team, who then tell us when there is a fix, all the while keeping users informed.
Our position at the hub of the digital department sees us fielding app queries and passing on to the relevant, iOS, Android, daily edition or Windows apps teams. Feedback from users – whether feature requests or complaints – is collated and disseminated at meetings and in monthly round ups. Clearly, not every request will be implemented, but user feedback is certainly taken into account. Our users are vocal and will also communicate with us when a feature they like is removed.
Now that userhelp work more closely with the development team, we’ve improved our ability to provide diagnostic information to the digital development team to help with troubleshooting. Users are now presented with in-app options to contact us for help, so if they’re mid article on one of the apps, but spot an error, or would simply like to send a demand for a new feature, there’s a button that sends their query through, complete with diagnostic report. Equally, improved diagnostics (such as browser type, operating system, referring page, or the ID of an advert) are now appended automatically to the foot of the email sent to the userhelp team, for desktop related requests. This not only helps the developers investigate bugs, but also significantly cuts the number of interactions that a member of the userhelp team has to have with each user, all of which helps to resolves issues via a smooth pathway. Previously, users would often have to be asked several follow up questions to help us resolve the problem. Busy users haven’t necessarily got time to fill us in on every tiny detail and some admit that whilst being well informed citizens, they’re not particularly tech savvy.
Many users ask for step-by-step help to ensure that they are using one of our recommended browsers, so that all the features of our site work correctly. We provide them with the appropriate guidance . Our closeness to the development teams has ensured that our FAQ pages are constantly monitored and updated. These pages exist for each product but sometimes people prefer personal contact by email or Twitter.
The integration of the userhelp team into the overall digital development department has helped to professionalise our service. We are now armed with much more accurate knowledge about forthcoming updates to the app, product launches and bug fixes. This has then enabled us to anticipate user queries, and write useful responses well in advance. Previously we’d be finding out about new features from our users, not always from our development team, whilst attempting to help users in real time. Now that we are close to our developer colleagues we can provide more realistic timeframes for fixes, and far more detailed answers to technical queries. Overall, this is a move that has improved communication both internally and externally, in turn benefitting our relationship with the development team, and our users. It’s difficult to envisage a return to a more stratified effort to help users, as more of our them continue to access the news digitally.