What’s new: new design and interaction for comments

Hana Mohan

1min read

The ‘Comments’ feature is an integral part of SupportBee’s ticketing workflow; it is the first layer of collaboration and internal communication in handling tickets. Our most recent update changes the design and interaction flow for that feature. Considering how fundamental the feature is, we deliberated extensively over it before making the decision to implement the change. This change is very much a response to the multitude of requests we have received over the past several years. It is not uncommon for us to receive an email like the one below (sent by one of our customers) at least once or twice a month.

Hello

I have been using the comments box to note various things, one such item is the ticket number of our external support team.

However, I have noticed this comment appears to be attached to the email you are typing, as opposed to being a 'separate' item I can list or see all my comments as I progress through a ticket’s communication.

I have to find the email at the time to see the comment.

Is this so or am I doing something wrong, please?

If so could this be a consideration for future to make comments 'separate' and perhaps listed in the right-hand margin as is all related tickets?

As tempting as it was to immediately make changes in response to a few requests, we wanted to make sure we thought through the consequences of the change and also had good reasons for implementing it.

The following three points helped us validate our decision:

  1. The new design helps keep the thread exchange between you and your customers, clean. We have noticed that threads become unnecessarily long when they are inundated with comments.

  2. Searching for older comments in threads with more than ten/fifteen replies became cumbersome. Keeping the comment section independent of the thread allows you to scan and operate on replies and comments independently.

  3. Apart from offering the ability to communicate internally, having comments in the sidebar helps in posting ‘notes’ about the email thread or the customer which can be accessed easily within the ticket’s interface.

Here’s a short video from Varun Pai, our designer explaining the most recent update.

Update to Comments in SupportBee from Hana Mohan on Vimeo.

We are currently reviewing all feedback to improve this interaction. If you have any thoughts, please feel free to mail us at [email protected].

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