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Tech Updates: New Help Section
Story by kfarrell, saguirl, TechUpdates
Published on November 21, 2007 in Etsy News 		Photo by redux4u


The busy holiday season brings tons of new users to Etsy every day. We've written some help guides to help these newbies find their way around the site. To find the help guides, click the "Help" link at the top of any Etsy page, and then select "Help Guides" from the list on the left.

We'll be adding more guides to the list as we finish writing them, including guides on tagging, chat, Treasury, and other Etsy tools.

If you go to the How-to Help Guides and then Ways to Shop, you will see a snazzy video saguirl made that walks you through all the different ways to browse plus some tips on straight-forward searching.


Etsy Help Guide: How to shop for an item on Etsy from Etsy on Vimeo



If you have a help guide you'd like to see, let us know in the comments below!

Tags browsing, guides, Help, Help Guides, newbies, search, shopping, Tech Updates, videos
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5 comments     Login to add your own!

Nov. 21, 2007 at 3:59 p.m. letitiah

The checkout guide is *the greatest*!

Nov. 21, 2007 at 4:58 p.m. AliciaMae

this is a definitely a step in the right direction...thank you

Nov. 21, 2007 at 5:46 p.m. eclipse

This is a good step to making the help area more usable. Hopefully this will reduce the demand on email support and "how do I" forum posts.

What would be really great (and reduce the demand on email support even more) would be to make the whole help/FAQ section searchable. Most websites have a searchable help section. Etsy's help info is contained in 9 separate pages,(not counting forums) plus the new videos, and you have to manually (visually) search all of them to find your answer. There should be a simple search box and you type a keyword or two and get back all the help articles that contain those words. (ordered by relevance)
more detailed description of idea:
http://www.etsy.com/forums_thread.php...

Nov. 21, 2007 at 7:38 p.m. eclipse

It would also really be great if the links to these videos were "in context", i.e., in the place where the question will occur. For example the feedback video should be linked on the feedback page itself.
Providing the answers to question at the spot where the question will occur is the best way to get people to find answers on their own. In-context help files. You see this on many well-designed websites. In the middle of pages like edit profile, etc, there will be little links with labels like "what is this?" or "?" or "more".
Clicking those links opens a little new window with info and help using that feature. You don't have to go digging around for the help file, it's right there where you are using the feature.

Nov. 22, 2007 at 10:45 a.m. Vanessa

in context, exactly what i think too.

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