MindTouch - 1 Year Later
February 12, 2016
MindTouch - 1 Year Later
Score 6 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Software Version
MindTouch 4
Overall Satisfaction with MindTouch
We use MindTouch as our online help center, supporting the use of our software product. We keep all articles and information public so our users do not need to log in to access information. Within our organization we have a team of 3 people primarily responsible for content creation on the Help Center, with 1 acting as the primary editor/publisher. A larger team makes content suggestins and drafts but does not actively use the platform to create or publish.
MindTouch has provided us our first dedicated, searchable help library, and therefore has helped us better support our users.
MindTouch has provided us our first dedicated, searchable help library, and therefore has helped us better support our users.
- Reusable content: I do love their tool that allows us to create a piece of content, bank it, and then add it to different areas of the site as needed. When it is necessary to update that infromation, for example after we release a product update for our software, we just go to one place and update it there, and the changes are carried through whereever we have used that piece of content.
- Search: The search tool seems to work quite well. This is the main way our users find information nd we have so far found it to be reliable.
- Product Issues: We have frequently run into issues where we are trying to do something that seems basic, but there is an issue that we either have to work around, or wait and hope for a fix. For example, we're trying to embed Vimeo videos, but MindTouch continues to strip the full screen option from the Vimeo player. This is a critical feature for our users.
- Limitations of Support: We have also experienced several instances where we have a problem, but the support team either can't tell us or won't tell us the solution because they consider it an add-on service. In the end we have been able to figure out most of these issues on our own, but it has increased the overhead to support this product. There have also been cases where the solution was not what the engineer implied it would be, which has left us to wonder in some cases how knowledgeable or equipped the support staff is to assist.
- Design and Customizations: When we analyzed the product, it was described as extremely customizable. For the most part we have found it to be so. However, in critical ways it is not customizable, certain features are tied together, so my recommendation to any buyer is to decide on the final design and functionality for the system, and ensure those customizations are possible. It should be noted we did not use a MindTouch recommended programmer to make our customizations, as we wanted to keep this development in-house. I am not confident that using one of their recommended programmers would have made this process easier, and it most certainly would have increased our cost significantly.
- Publishing and Privacy: The process MindTouch recommends to set up draft pages for editing and approval is cumbersome. This seems to be a workaround practice rather than something the tool was designed to accommodate.
- We have only had our MindTouch instance publicly available for 7 months (4 of those months was to a limited subset of our users), so our ROI is not apparant at this time. However, I am confident our development of an online help center will help us improve product adoption success and improve our NPS over time.