Support/Kitsune/CRs PRD

This is the project page for creating the new Canned Responses feature within Kitsune.

Vision statement

Because of the high volumes of questions SUMO handles weekly, the platform needs to provide a system to easily manage the repetitive tasks that contributors face. Canned responses will simplify and speed up how users provide answers to other users boosting the quality and the consistency of these replies.

Purpose of Canned responses

Automate often used starts and ends of conversations.
Automate often used parts of responses.
Save work on typing.
Encourage usage of articles
Making it easier for new contributors to get started

Concerns

Makes it too easy to give incorrect/invalid solutions. (eg. a downgrade firefox canned response becoming too popular.)
Anyone can post an elaborated answer in a couple of clicks. Today they can link to the wrong article too.
May be overwhelming
Makes it easy to spam the forums

Proposed dimension

30-50 canned responses global and ~ 10 per user (TBD)

Types of canned responses

Greetings
Asking questions to the user (when did it start, etc)
Suggesting troubleshooting steps
Suggesting articles or other forum threads (this will be the vast majority of responses)
OS-specific steps. (Run dialog, Task Manager, Activity Monitor, finding profile folder, etc)

Personas

- Admin: - Contributor: - User: - Visitor:

Features

Critical

This is the basic collection of features the service need to have in order to officially go live. [ P0 ] Canned responses should put the content in the text area for editing. When triggering a canned response, the text should be pasted as any other text input in the answer box. This text should be editable.

[ P0 ] You should be able use more than one canned response per post. After including one canned response, the contributor should be able to include any other amount of CRs. The mechanism to include the first or the following CRs should be the same.

[ P0 ] Canned responses could be edited as a wiki article (or have a seperate system but with approvals/reviews) Canned responses should share the same logic as the rest of Kitsune wiki articles.

[ P0 ] Categories (two level deep). CRs must belong to a category. A category groups CRs in "folders" for easy navigation and discoverability. There's no limit of categories.

[ P0 ] Hierarchical menu of available canned responses, like live chat and AoA (Needs UX) The user who is looking for a CR should be able to navigate trough the different categories with a hierarchical menu.

[ P0 ] Administration -- should have its own permission bit [ P0 ] Have an admin page that lets you see/edit all the available canned responses Users with Admin level should have access to a page/dashboard with a list of all the CRs. In this page admins should be able to create new CRs and edit the ones that already exist.

[ P0 ] Add a permission bit to allow usage of canned responses Only show canned responses to contributors

Important

The following list of features should be the ones that follow the initial launch and should be ready in 2 quarters after the official launch of the service.

[ P1 ] Personal (per-helper) canned responses Forums contributors should be able to have their own portfolio of CRs that don't appear in the main collection of CRs. This collections should be limited and the limit should be easy to modify. We want to offer this feature with few CRs first (3) and be able to expand it if there is an strong demand.

[ P1 ] CR Labels/Tags. Ability to attach multiple labels or tags to a CR so it's easier to search and navigate through them.

[ P1 ] Show CRs within a label. UI that shows all the available CRs for an specific label.

[ P1 ] Simplify the regular reviews of canned responses. Create an alert in the adming page for CRs with low and high usage in an specific time-range.

[ P1 ] Access by a hotkey and autocomplete, for power users eg. CTRL+SHIFT+C, then type "saf". "Safe Mode" canned response appears as a suggestion Suggest Ctrl+Space (common autocomplete shortcut in e.g. Visual Studio and other IDEs), where the workflow is to type a few characters and then hit Ctrl+Space to autocomplete. Awesomebar behaviors -- Search and auto-suggest options with a drop-down.

Nice To Have

The platform would benefit from these features but they are not required for the daily usage of it.

[ P2 ] OS-specific responses (eg. showfor) Create a mechanism similar to {for} in Kitsune KB so the answer populated is tailored to the User Agent of the user who asked. In the longer run a new reader could see the option (through a drop down) to change the OS or FF version while reading an answer that contains a Canned response. Alternative: make canned responses generic enough to cover multiple versions/environments? This might be a reason to require more than one level deep categories for canned responses. You could then create a canned response sub-category for "Exit Firefox" under a more generic "Common Actions" category. This "Exit Firefox" sub-category would then contain three canned response items: Windows, Mac, Linux (If we are gonna use a low level solution I think it's better to offer generic solutions to make sure they are helpful to as many people as possible and not only for the asker - Ibai)

[ P2 ] Have a way to see individual contributor's personal canned responses Admins should be able to view personal Canned responses in the main admin page. This CRs are marked as "personal". Admins could propose them as "candidates to become public".

[ P2 ] Star/favorite canned responses for quicker access This needs UX definition of how one would access a starred response quicker

[ P2 ] Allow templates in the forum Allow the usage of the KB templates in the forum as regular CRs. Drawback: helpers don't see what they are sending to the user -- also would require implementing the kb wiki parser in the forums.

[ P2 ] Localization will be done by a new set of canned responses for each locale. Have an structure ready to localize CRs. Each locale would have it's own set of CRs.

Unprioritized features

Features that we may want to implement in a future, or we want to think about in a second stage [ P3 ] A different (or sub) set of canned responses for new contributors vs. experienced contributors Hide easily-misunderstood and dangerous responses from non-trusted contributors Lowers the barrier of entry How do switch between them? Setting in user prefs Permission bit "Show advanced options" item in the canned response menu, a la windows explorer

[ P3 ]Make it possible to specify text cursor position and selection length after inserting canned response in text area? (Useful when e.g. having a canned response that starts and end with generic text but has specific content in the middle, e.g: "Dear user, blah blah... try this link: http://[SelectionStart]www.example.com[SelectionEnd] ... good luck!"

Essentially this might just translate to adding two properties of a canned response in the Edit Canned Response page/dialog: SelStart (numeric value) and SelLength (numeric value)

[ P3 ] Suggest CRs based on thread tags. Cross-match labels on SuMo threads and CRs to highlight/suggest CRs that could be used while answering to the question.