first and foremost thank you for your work on Zammad and for enabling this community to have a voice.
We are currently evaluating Zammad 5.0.3 on a test VM and like how easy we can customize the ticket dialog to ask for additional information and avoid having to call the user back and asking for simple stuff like asset numbers, therefore speeding up the ticket resolution process.
Having said that, I would like to see the option to add a help text to custom workflow objects.
Ticket objects currently only offer to add a Title and a standard value. Experience told us that the more information we provide to the users, the better. If we could add a description to each object guide the user it would be very helpful and ensure that there will be less frustration on the user side once we start asking for a lot of extra information when creating a ticket.
This would not only help our users but also our new hires and helpdesk interns when creating a ticket.
Showing this help text in the ticket creation view without blowing up sleek design could be done via the help circles that are already used on the zammad dashboard.
I think that would be fantastic!
Maybe although, it would be better to have a small text field under the box or under the title for accessibility reasons, usability via mobile and for how the workflows are currently built.
What do you think?
hiding the help text behind the questionmark circle to keep the design sleek and
showing the full help text above/under the affected object to make the help text accessible for users that have trouble understanding modern webdesign mechanisms like mouseovers
would definetely be the cherry on top for me!
When talking about a minimum viable product, for me, it would be fine to start out with the question mark mouseover since this solution is already implemented on the dashboard and then iterate this feature from there.
100% this. Would love to see the addition of object helper texts implemented. Especially with the option to add pictures and links to guide the users as much as possible.
If the core dev team isn’t interested maybe can be developed as an addon/package?
I haven’t much experience in Ruby so i’m not sure how difficult could this be.
Do you have any expertise/experience in this?
We started building custom Workflows with if/then logic in our mind and our customers are often having questions and/or are in need of clarification on why the ticket is building up the way it is and what exactly these “popped up” objects want from them.
Example: we want to offer customers to pick a day from the calendar object when ticket type is “request for home office workstation service”. We have some information in our knowledge base about service times and how to prep for a home office workspace etc but people never look there.
This feature would bring the information to the customer “just in time” when he is writing a ticket instead of hoping that the customer visits our knowledge base to
a) find out that there IS more into about requesting home office service visits and
b) find out that there are things to prepare on both sides
c) find out that we have to get an appointment preference in 2-3 days advance
At the moment customers are usually just picking the current day, make no preparations, think IT will magically fulfill their request as wished and we have to call them back clarifying all this stuff.
This is just one example of multiple services we are trying to improve through custom workflows. The workflows are great and triggered the creation of many new object. Now if there would be some way to take the user by the hand and walk them through all of this ticket request process that suddenly became more than just “title” and “description” would be great.
I also have to second the example from the original post that asking for an asset Tag can end up in a little journey for the customer depending on the device and the device age. I lost count on how many times people entered the Dell power adapter serial number in the asset number field. Love the mock-ups!
Great example with the calendar object and how there is always more information/clarification to give when presenting options to the user. Thank you @Soho!
@Filippoc Sorry but I am a sysadmin, not a developer. All I can offer is the mockups I provided and to buy the devs a digital coffee if implemented
edit: now that I think about it… I could offer to extend the docs covering the helper texts once implemented and do a pull request. I know it’s not much but I have a little bit of experience in doing that.
Maybe we are lucky and the zammad team adds this user story to one of the next sprints for 5.1 or 5.2 since it improves directly onto version five’s main feature
+1 from current OTRS 8 customer with >1000 users that really wants to leave this product behind for something fresh and open source.
Just read about Zammad’s recent workflow update on Reddit and had to check it out.
A dozen times yes to more user and agent guidance.
Processes and workflows… no, everything need explanation and clarification.
The explanation has to come to the user while the process is taking place.
The user won’t go to the explanation. Heck, even the agents won’t most of the time.
We currently have a lot of ACLs set up in OTRS to make the process of filling out a ticket dynamic. In every step of the process we built it in a way that the user and the agents are provided with all the information they need. We even insert checklists for the agents automatically for most ticket types.
Users and agents also get knowledge base articles suggested in real time while typing up the ticket or answers… but I am getting off topic.
The screenshots from Samb look like a good idea. I would love to see more development in this direction!
Yeah same here. Lots of OTRS ACLs keeping the boat afloat. Hang in there and check back in a few months. Looks like Zammad just started implementing the „big boi“ stuff
We just had an evaluation meeting regarding Zammad and, after some discussion, we agreed that your mockup is indeed the best way to solve help texts. Of course having options how to insert help texts would be the best case scenario but as far as we are concerned your mockup would be the better starting point for this feature
