November '19 Product Announcements

With the Gen 2 Assistant being rolled out during this month we have been doubling down on tracking performance and areas of improvement. After several weeks of analysis and tracking, we have been pushing out smaller updates focused on tweaking and enhancing certain parts of the Assistant and the platform.

Assistant enhancements

Assistant speed

One of the major challenges is to provide a reliable and fast Assistant regardless of the customer location or network bandwidth. With the Gen 2 Assistant update, we have from the get-go been focused on increasing the first load experience by minimising the minimal Assistant data needs and prioritising in data sequencing. Since the initial release, we have pushed 23-speed enhancements to the assistant resulting in a further improvement of the quick Layerise Assistant delivery.

Assistant Search speed

Based on our user behaviour analysis one of the often utilised features is the in Assistant search. To make sure that we deliver the best possible search experience we have been updating our search algorithms to increase search result speed. Instead of requiring minimal 3 characters for live results we now empower the user to seek out results from the first character input. As a result of this users will now be able to see the first "most relevant" results 1.5s to 2.5s faster depending on their bandwidth and character input.

Generic updates

SEO Optimisation

One request we have been getting is that you want your product Assistants to rank high on the Google search engine when your customers search for it. We have been working on this during this month and have pushed dedicated updates.

As it takes Google search engines some time to crawl pages and thereby to reposition results we have been tracking and comparing the performance. As an example, evident to the image below when searching for "Mate X Assistant", Google will return ~105.000.000 results with the Nr. 1 result being the Layerise hosted Mate X Assistant.

In detail, we use the content provided both on Product and Experience level to build the best meta information. Moreover, we populate Open Graph Tags on every page level using the content available on the Topic & Highlight level. Overall this means that regardless of the amount of localisation per individual Product Assistants, we will run SEO optimisation for each localised market. To increase the likeliness of your Assistants to be ranked Nr. 1 or at least top 3 on Google follow these simple content rules:

Make sure your product

 

title

 

is using the marketed product name

Use a recognisable

 

product image

. Best performing images are with the product only on white/transparent background

Write clear and searchable Topic & Highlight titles

Keep the experience content updated

iOS & Safari

November has also included updates for iOS devices with WebKit (Safari Technology), which is a requirement for all browsers running on iOS devices. Due to the Service Worker issues on WebKit reported back to Apple back in 2018-04-10 (reported bug) we have seen little willingness from Apple to commit a swift fix to the issue.

Due to the prolonged process, we have throughout 2019 exhausted all our options for finding a fix to this problem while remaining dependent on the Service Worker on iOS devices. During the beginning of November, we have decided to refrain from Service Worker dependency on iOS devices as it introduces bugs and issues.

As os today, Apple has annonced a partial fix to the Service Worker issue with unclarity on when the full solution will be rolled out. The full WebKit release notes on the matter can be found here.

What next

As hinted last month, we have been working on highly requested features, which we will release during December. Stay tuned as we will be publishing How-to and API documentation updates during the next few weeks.

And as always, if you have any questions or need help, please reach out.