Rate My Page

When it comes to harnessing your teams collective knowledge in pages there is no better tool than Confluence. To let authors know that their content has been helpful you can now easily share feedback.

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Inspiration

Nabil and I (Adil) are working in a very open company where collaboration is part of our DNA. Collaborating on projects and sharing knowledge in Confluence goes without saying. Recently we hired new employees who had to go remotely through their onboarding process. We heavily relied on our documentation in Confluence and asked everyone to let us know which pages helped them (achieve a task) or confused them. We tracked their feedback in a Confluence table and revised the pages based on their comments. This inspired other teams to follow our example and ask for feedback for their own pages in their spaces. As this helped us a lot and we want to continue with that practice we wanted to build an app that captures users feedback quickly and provides an overview for authors.

What it does

We have built a small feedback form that is displayed just below the page title that allows authors to gain insight about how their content is received. All users need to do is to state if they find the page helpful or not and leave a short comment. The feedback is displayed in an overview within the space administration with useful stats.

How we built it

We have built the app with Forge, more specifically with the latest Confluence extension points that were introduced on July 2nd, 2020: Confluence Byline and Confluence Space Settings.

Challenges we ran into

We didn't have any experience with Forge but loved the recent updates to it which is why we wanted to start building our first cloud app. Initially, we hoped to have a more engaging feedback form with a slider to capture more precise feedback. This would have resulted in a more insightful feedback overview. We also wanted to change the text below the page title for users who have already submitted their feedback.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

After attending the last Atlas Camp in Vienna we were delighted by what we have learned about Forge and couldn't wait to work with the new framework. As its capabilities were very limited we only made small features just to get a feeling for it. When the Forge team announced the new extension points we immediately decided to try and build our app with Forge. This is why we are extremely proud of our result as it wouldn't have been possible less than two weeks ago. On a side note: This was the first project we worked on without drinking buckets of coffee. #itsthelittlethings

What we learned

By using Forge we really don't need to worry about hosting our app that does not only come with extra costs but with the related legal and data privacy issues. This takes a huge load off our mind.

What's next for Rate My Page

Depending on the capabilities of Forge we definitely want to improve the user experience:

  • More options in the feedback form for more precise feedback (eg. 'I am missing information, There are no links to related pages etc)
  • Notifications for page authors (and editors)
  • Reset rating for individual pages
  • Link ratings to page versions
  • Voting function for anonymous users (for documentation sites) and many more :)

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