April'20 Product Announcements

Since our last update, COVID-19 has become a major global challenge. While things are getting better for some, others are going through some of the hardest periods of their lives. We are sending our warmest thoughts to you and your loved ones. Stay safe and healthy.

For the April update, we have been focused on building solutions that solve some of the most requested enhancements. Therefore, this update focuses on branding customisation options and covers some major changes to our Assistant URL schema in our constant effort to maximise SEO and increase end-user trust.

Advanced branding features

With this update we are happy to announce that we are rolling out advanced branding features. This has been one of the most requested features and with good reason. Making sure that your Product Assistants have brand similarity and can be customised to fit brand identity is key for providing a brand-safe Product Assistant environment.

From now on all Paid plans will have access to advanced customisation abilities through their account. It is now possible to configure:

Colour

Logo

Icon

Cover

Over the next couple of months, we will be adding additional advanced abilities to further help you create the most optimal brand align Product Assistant.

Moreover, all PAID plans will no longer require the Layerise attribution, and the brand logo will take its position.

Improved settings UI

As we are adding more abilities it is natural that configuration pages as settings become cluttered. To counter that we are rolling out UI improvements for the following setting:

Organisation setting

Workspace setting

Profile setting

SEO and user-friendly URL's

From the initial release of the Product Assistant V1, we have been tracking and analysing the Assistant accessibility, sharability, trustworthiness and search engine performance. While many of the design-centric and performance technical factors as UI, UX, loading speed and more have been dealt with over the last many month's releases, one area we have been super eager to look at has been the Uniform Resource Locator or as most known by URL.

Until now all Product Assistant were accessed through the individual product ID ie. ck9lcwuzy2smv0782uk6oki1g placed in the and of our URL path. While this setup didn't really cause any issues, it did result in ugly looking URL's as evident below:

Concluding that an URL is ugly is a cosmetic opinionated conclusion, however, there is a great deal of upside of making URL's user-readable. Allowing customers to easily understand the URL path, with the composition "domain.com/locale/brand/product", lowers the risk assessment of whether this is a safe destination. In addition, exposing clear and expected brand and product names increases trustworthiness, something that is essential during:

Product registration

Product onboarding

Troubleshooting

Communicating with support

Another great reason for introducing an improved URL schema is to maximise the SEO potential. Along with the Product Assistant title tag, link anchor text, and obviously the content itself, search engines use webpage’s URL to understand what the page and content are all about.

Finally, the rollout of the URL schema update will happen safely and without the need for any actions. Already created Product Assistants are already available with the new URL which can be accessed through your account. Any links based on the legacy URL are automatically routed and thereby still working.

Release date

We will be rolling out this release during the next few days. While all features, excluding advanced branding options, covered in this update will be available for Free and Paid plans, the advanced branding customisation is only available for Paid plans. As always, if you have any questions or need help, please reach out.