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Community Manager
July 19, 2016
Question

A New Dimension to Knowledge Articles: Start of an Interactive Experience

  • July 19, 2016
  • 22 replies
  • 6489 views

A valuable feature of many successful websites is the ability to serve up some "other stuff" associated to the product / service / literature you're interested in.

For commercial sites, the motivation is clear: "Other customers also bought.." draws attention at the right moment (when interest is high), reduces search effort and leads to further (hopefully mutually beneficial) transactions.

 

When it comes to our articles, the currency is different (Knowledge), but the circumstances and outcomes are similar. If we expose related content at the right time, we can reduce your search effort, and guide you to other sources of knowledge to improve your experience with PTC's products.

 

So what's new and how do I use it ?

The changes use our existing Search functionality to detect relevant content such as product documentation, help center topics, community threads, videos, and other articles.

When this happens, a box like this will appear below the article Resolution field, with familiar icons and links. You can load more content if there are more than 10 items, and the links always open up in a new tab, preserving the original article you were viewing:

K-Ntwk_1.jpg

 

What's next ?

We'll monitor how related content is used over the coming months, and stay alert to the feedback on you leave us on articles, and the comments on this blog.

Based on what you tells us, we'll continue to evolve the "Related" functionality.

Ultimately we're aiming to predict your next need based on the patterns we regularly see in Support, then expose the right content to take you through the next steps in your journey with our products.

 

Just another box ?

We'd like you to tell us. Please share your feedback with us, and others below. We look forward to hearing from you.

22 replies

PeterCaseCommunity ManagerAuthor
Community Manager
July 21, 2016

Great suggestion, Tom. I'll check whether we can do this as part of the changes made for next release (October timeframe).

PeterCaseCommunity ManagerAuthor
Community Manager
July 21, 2016

We're making some corrections at this time, to address some minor issues we found at release last week.

The corrections are to not display the related box when there is no related content, and the icon for articles is being updated to a "real" article icon instead of the current "lightning bolt". Checking CS242375 just now the related content box does not appear, so this appears to be fixed.

Thanks for reporting this.

Marco Tosin
21-Topaz I
21-Topaz I
July 21, 2016

I had just checked after your reply but I can still see related section (in my previous comment I made a mistake speaking of Related documents).

Marco
PeterCaseCommunity ManagerAuthor
Community Manager
July 22, 2016

Marco,

This is an issue we'll need to resolve on our side, and it's affecting customers who have set their PTC preferred language to something other than Engilsh.

I've let our Web Team know and will share an update once it's fixed.

Thank you.

23-Emerald IV
July 22, 2016

Peter Case‌, here is an article where the links in the "Related" section have nothing to do with the article's actual content.  FWIW.

CS67713

PeterCaseCommunity ManagerAuthor
Community Manager
July 25, 2016

Thanks for the heads up, Tom. Classic case of the law of unintended consequences. I've reported this as an issue to our Web Team, and asked that an exception be set on this particular article.

Marco Tosin
21-Topaz I
21-Topaz I
July 25, 2016

Hi Peter,

this article refers to this discussion in the community, but the discussion doesn't have an answer and not even a single comment.

It is correct to relate an article to a discussion like that?

Marco
23-Emerald IV
July 25, 2016

What's the alternative?  I'm guessing the algorithm is looking for similar content.  I can't imagine it's going to be able to determine if the content is actually valid or accurate.  If it only links to content that has an answer, it will miss ~70% of the available content.  (Only ~30% of questions are ever marked as "answered".)  Maybe if the post is marked as a question and has no answers it could ignore it, but this would be a pretty narrow use case.  How do you think it should work?

Marco Tosin
21-Topaz I
21-Topaz I
July 25, 2016

I think that a discussion without at least a comment it's useless.

I'm with you that the algorithm shouldn't be too narrow but at least should avoid to point to a question without a comment.

I don't think should link only to discussion with answer, because there are lots of discussion not marked as answered but with useful comments.

Marco
23-Emerald IV
July 25, 2016

Peter Case‌, here is an example of multiple versions of the same document being linked:

CS11804