2020-03-26 Meeting notes- Proactive Chat

Owned by Gabe Galson
Last updated: Mar 27, 2020 by Cynthia Schwarz (Unlicensed)
2 min read

Date

Mar 26, 2020

Participants

  • @Gabe Galson @Olivia Given Castello @David Lacy @Cynthia Schwarz (Unlicensed) @Jackie Sipes @Katherine Westbrook (Unlicensed) @Rebecca Dashiell @Rachel Cox (Unlicensed)

Notes

Discuss Proactive Chat

  • Olivia’s proposed implementing Springshare’s proactive chat feature, i.e. Penn State’s

    • Ideally, the button would indicate whether a librarian is currently online

    • It’s persistent and floating

  • A technical issue prevented Chris from implementing a pop up previously

    • The pop-out version of the chat widget uses javascript and there was an issue with how the Ruby handles the javascript that prevented us from implementing the pop-out last summer.

From Chris: “It looks like we skipped the JS versions last summer because of the way Rails apps serve up the templates (of which our scripts in the top template, each page in another template, and then the footer for a third template. The browser is not rendering the top or bottom templates again when a page in our site loads, and so that JS we need is not called again as you navigate our site from page to page. Reloading/refreshing the page forces that top template to reload, and the script does get called, but that's not a workable solution. If you scroll back in out Slack thread here, to July 26th, you can see our original conversation about it.”

  • UX consideration- best practices recommend against this, but it’s an option

  • UX testing data- a majority of users wanted a pop-up (see this ticket)

    • Technical issues prevented this

  • Question- what are the outcomes the work will enable

    • is it just to make the chat more visible?

      • Olivia- Yes. Since the closure it’s become especially important to publicize our online services

    • Or, is the point to have a persistent floating button present on all library site pages

    • Other efforts to surface

  • Penn State’s feature, for comparison

    • Works well, generally speaking

  • Olivia’s mocking up a widget, will build out the widget itself (which was never customized as a part of the website project), consulting with Steven

    • The offline state of this widget should be built out

    • is it possible to make the hours regular per-day

    • is it possible to link to the hours page?

    • Good idea- link to libanswers FAQs

    • ‘Ask here PA’ link will probably be removed

Action items

@Cynthia Schwarz (Unlicensed) will follow up with Chris on the feasibility of a floating button leading to a pop up window customizable by Olivia, others

Decisions