The latest release of our Questions and Answers platform, Quandora 1.2.0, is now out and running, as per today 17th of October, 2012.
For this release the main focus has been a subject whose importance certainly doesn’t need to be stressed out: the product’s mobile interface. Apart that, the release includes an aspect that is perhaps less visible from a users experience point of view, but that is nonetheless extremely important: a clean, well structured, and complete REST API exposing Quandora’s functions.
The mobile app
Yep, that’s right: Quandora is now mobile. Being mobile is important for essentially any software nowadays, and Quandora is no exception (on the contrary).
Having Quandora on the phone means people can now see new questions (and generally new content) in real time, making it easier to contribute in response.
Think of the following scenario: you’re at a customer’s, or traveling. You see a new question arriving. You know the answer – it’s a short answer (it’s often the case!). Without the mobile feature, you would probably tell yourself “I’ll answer that later when I get home/to the office”, and chances are, you would forget to do it. But with Quandora mobile you can simply click the “Answer” button and type that little text. It takes 5 seconds to do it, and potentially brings critical answers to somebody from the team.
Also, a Questions and Answers base is totally the kind of content people love to spend time exploring without a particular purpose when they have a couple of spare moments. It allows discovering useful information and enriching one’s knowledge in a pleasant way. Traveling, commuting, or simply waiting for somebody to arrive at a meeting are all good times to browse and learn. Think Twitter – most Twitter users look at their feed during such unproductive in-betweens.
For the first mobile version, we’ve chosen HTML5 versus native application. We found this choice to provide a great user experience while letting us address the major mobile platforms at once. The interface is clean, reactive, providing a familiar experience to the mobile users. It works with both iPhone and Android, and doesn’t require installing and updating.
Next step on this front will be to leverage this work and package it as native app, with push notification enabled.
The REST API
Developing the mobile UI was the ideal opportunity to organize and expose Quandora’s functions as a REST API. The mobile version is just the beginning. We’re making it easy to build plugins for third party applications or platforms. Such implementations can go from a full fledged Q&A (basically, a complete Quandora integrated into a different platform) to smaller scope plugins. A typical example of the latter would be, for instance, adding to a bug tracker page a portlet displaying a list of related questions and answers, identified automatically based on the bug’s data analysis.
You can find on our website a complete documentation of Quandora’s REST API.
On our list of planned Quandora-powered Q&A add-ons: plugins for WordPress, Google email, and SalesForce CRM. What’s on yours? 😉
What’s next
After this highly technical release, the next ones will be focused on the user experience – specifically, on boosting the users engagement. Here’s a glimpse into the following 2 -3 releases’ scope:
* improving the email notifications to help the users discover interesting content
* sending periodic newsletters to highlight the latest activity
* more pro-activity in suggesting matters of interest to subscribe to
* possibility to reference a fellow member in a post and to have him/her notified about it
* “intelligent content” behavior allowing users to insert links to external resources into posts (ex: a Google doc, a code repository, a bug tracker page, etc)
* special tags: possibility to define special, administrator-managed tags (versus free form tags) to structure the knowledge bases accordingly with the organizations’ specifics.
Examples of special tags applications:
– A “Product version” could be a required tag to specify (from a preset list) in a technical knowledge base.
– A “Approved by the management” tag could be use to stamp an answer as “official”, action only available to accredited people.
– An “Obsolete” tag could be automatically added by the system after a certain time is elapsed since the last answer, on subjects that are highly expiration prone.
Stay tuned for this and more awesome stuff coming in the following 2-3 releases. Meanwhile, happy knowledge sharing!
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