Shelf Product Update — September 2018
This past month we added a way to provide content feedback via means of ratings, published a new status page, and further improved content navigation.
Content Feedback via Gem Ratings
It is one of the challenges in Knowledge Management to curate meaningful and high-quality content. Highly accessible quality content significantly reduces the time users need to resolve their issues and satisfy their information needs.
Shelf provides various reports that assist with assessing content performance, such as the most and least popular content report. Now, users gain the ability to provide direct feedback on content via a straight-forward five-star rating system.
When opening a Gem Page to view content, users can rate the quality of a Gem by selecting Add Rating. As content gets updated over time, ratings can be adjusted upward or downward to reflect its current state.
Content Analytics for Ratings
To assist with the assessment of the content in your knowledge base, we added a content quality report to the Shelf Analytics Dashboard. Admins now have the ability to quickly view ratings for a given month and assess individual pieces of content, such as in terms of the quality and frequency of ratings. Furthermore, a report showing the distribution of ratings is available to quickly assess the perceived overall content quality.
Filtering of Content by Rating
The Shelf Rating system is not only useful for Content Curators who seek to optimize their KM content. It’s equally useful for users to narrow down their searches to such content that has proved most valuable to their peers.
Shelf features a sophisticated set of content filters that enable users to quickly find what they’re looking for by selecting the relevant context for a particular search. The new Rating filter adds to this experience and now it is possible to limit search results by content quality as well.
Search results that have received at least one rating include the score as filled stars and stand out from the unrated content, making it easy to identify.
As with other Shelf functionality, Admins have the ability to customize the behavior for their account, from enabling the use of ratings only for certain user roles to completely turning off any rating functionality. Simply navigate to the Customize page on the Admin Panel to configure your experience.
The All-New Shelf Status Page
At Shelf, we pride ourselves not only with building the most user-friendly and powerful KM solution but also with providing a platform that is very reliable and highly available.
On our new status page, you can easily access the current operational status of our systems, whether it’s our primary system, our APIs, or the available integrations.
When an incident does happen, you can follow through until resolution as we publish updates related to the impacted system on the status page itself.
Improved Content Navigation
There are some subtle but meaningful updates to both the way libraries and folders are displayed on the search results as well as how content gets refreshed when viewing the Home Dashboard.
The Home Dashboard is the entry point to Shelf and gives quick access to content, such as recently added and updated Gems or your favorited and recently viewed Gems.
We’ve improved the way that content gets refreshed while making sure what you’re currently looking at doesn’t suddenly disappear. So, your own actions lead to new or changed content being displayed while other users’ actions don’t impact your current view.
Shelf gives you the option to view content and search results in three different formats: The Card View is great to see large content previews, the Snippet View includes rich information about the Gems, and the compact List View lets you see a lot of content without the need to scroll.
Previously, Pinned Content was always displayed as cards while folders were always displayed as mini-cards. Now, the layouts are unified so that folders and pinned content adhere to the view you selected.
This concludes our update for September. As always, all changes are available on your Shelf already and your feedback is most welcome.
I’m looking forward to sharing our next set of updates soon and want to thank you for your continued support of Shelf!
Originally published at blog.shelf.io on October 5, 2018.
