December 2020
Why F.A.Q. is important and how we have integrated it.
Sooner or later users start to have questions about the use of the product for which they can get answers only from technical support. But what if there are more than one million users and the support team runs out of resources for a quick response?
Different solutions may come to the rescue, depending on the type and frequency of the problem. However, generally speaking, onboarding, tooltips, badges, popups, botnets - any interaction that doesn't complicate the experience and informs the user of a feature as clearly as possible - can help.
Some would say that instead of information complications it's better to make everything clear and convenient at once, but «Understandability» is impossible to trace either qualitatively or quantitatively. There will always be a group of people who either don't understand what works and how it works or who are not interested in how it can work.
For this reason, products develop a separate section dedicated to frequently asked questions, in which all sorts of information about the product and its functions are posted - F.A.Q.
Lensa has a fairly simple editor interface, which is hard to get lost in because of the familiar behavioural patterns of similar applications. By exploring the application in real time, trying out various functions, it's easy to get the hang of it.
However, it's not all that easy. The challenge came about because of two factors.
Firstly, the workload on the helpdesk was beyond what was possible. Secondly, there were a number of issues that were impossible to tell with the usual interaction, so the F.A.Q. implementation turned out to be a neat solution.
The final goal was to reduce the number of template calls to support by developing a section in settings, where the user could find answers to the most topical questions: How to process a photo; Why something doesn't work; Not enough features; Working with subscriptions.
All requirements were formed based on F.A.Q. research of other applications: Some support was divided into sections (chat, feedback and questions/answers); Others used articles (what's new and searchable topic guides).
We wanted something that: Accessible in a minimum number of steps; Presented in a simple and understandable way; Presented in large blocks with topics, a list of questions and answers; Contains an emoji as an evaluation metric; Brings the user to a support team if an answer is not found; Can provide ongoing support and maintain relevance regardless of release.
By the time of the F.A.Q. discussions, all the copywriting was ready, so the main discussions were about implementation: whether to upload all the Assets to the server or store in a downloadable assembly, and also how to visualise: a one-page sheet with search or an accordion for each question.
While the pros of storing everything in an assembly outweighed the cons, visualisation bounced around from one to the other until it was decided to use paginated navigation via grouped tables on iOS and lists on Android, replicating the native settings from which questions were to be accessed.
The section turned out to be very rich: 5 themes, clearly explaining all the features of the application, 17 questions, more than 30 answers and images available in a couple of steps.
During the technical implementation, F.A.Q. grew almost 2 times and got an additional functionality called «Question Tree», which is activated during the communication with the support team and helps to navigate the F.A.Q. topics faster.
Future plans include extending the functionality with experiments to improve the user experience and handling of sales pitches.
Since the release of the F.A.Q. the support department has become considerably easier to process Lensa requests. The figures show it clearly, there are 2 times less queries by: Subscription decreased 2 times, from ~330 to ~130 tickets per month; Face Detection 4 times less, from ~40 to ~10 tickets per month.
It also became known that between March and May, ~5,000 unique users clicked on at least one of the F.A.Q. questions. (that's about 2% of all active new users), while the total number of hits on all topics and questions already exceeds 3,000,000 requests.
The most frequently read topics are: Subscription — 39%; Get to know Lensa — 39%; I have a suggestion — 32%; Some features are not active — 23%; Video — 17%.
Within the Subscription topic, the most popular questions are: Cancellation (58% of those who have interacted with subscription blocks); The Trial (51% of those who interacted with the subscription block).
Notably, of those who explored the Cancellation block, 8% cancelled subscriptions during the day (~100 out of ~1200).
In addition, the average ARR app score increased from 3.44 to 3.55 after the release, though the ANR app score itself is still 4.9.
You can see all the screens and flows that our team has developed in the Figma preview or by clicking on this link. The screens were developed before the design team switched to Auto-Layouts, which were added to Figma in November 2020.
The list of persons reflects those who provided support and cooperation in the process of developing the feature and the article. Also the list indicates all those who are responsible for the content of the article.
