Board Thread:Consensus Track/@comment-22479560-20131217114600/@comment-22479560-20131218234132

Deyvid Petteys wrote: ... I agree that the Service Desk Moderator is a useless position. ... The problem is that people don't want to read through them; they want a warm body to tell them what the answer is.

Service Desk Moderator
The Self-service Pages and the Service Desk Front Page (explained below) need an "owner", I think, someone with overview and organization talent. By assigning this function to a certain staff member, we make it clear who that owner is. If this certain staff member is recruited from the existing staff or not, is equal to me.

What users want
In the last few decades, in my work as software architect I've seen a lot software designs that "worked" and a few that didn't. What successful software had in common was efficiency: Users in general want to do their task "fast and easy". Successful software supports that.

Looking at the current situation when a member has to choose between reading help pages and style guides or drop the problem on the talk page of a staff member, the latter is usually "faster and easier".

To make our users happy, the only thing we have to do is make a solution that is (for the user) even faster and easier than "dropping it on a talk page". To make our staff happy too, it would be nice if a significant part of the service requests would be solved by the submitter of the request himself my reading our documentation.

This is how that's usually done, we could do something similar.
 * 1) We collect/create "Self Service" pages. Each self-service page, usually only a few lines of text, helps a user to solve one problem.
 * 2) We lead users with a service request (using a "create service request" (or so) link) to a page (the Service Desk Front Page) where we ask them 2 (or so) question. Each question has a list of 7 (or so) predefined answers.
 * 3) We use of the answers to check if there is a self-service page for the incident. If so we present the self-service page and ask the user "Does this solve the problem?".
 * 4) If we have no self-service page for the request, or the self-service page didn't solve the problem, we create a new thread on the Service Desk forum, copy the answers to this thread and ask the user to complete and submit the service request.

I made a diagram to illustrate the above but it seems that the uploading of images is disabled at the moment, I'll include it in a later post.Documentalist (talk) 23:41, December 18, 2013 (UTC)