Alert users to new features in the product

[mkdir-washington-edu]

Feature Request Form

Problem you are trying to address with this feature

When a new feature comes out, especially when it's for all users (or all LMS app users, or all web app users) we want to increase the visibility of that feature as much as possible. Some users have set our emails to Spam, some have our emails blocked by their institution, and other communication issues crop up.

The most reliable way we can engage current users is to show messaging inside our app. That may have to be particular to their use case (LMS app vs web ap, Canvas vs other LMSs, etc).

As an example, for the upcoming LMS Dashboard release, the way into the LMS dash is under the account icon which is likely rarely clicked on by users. If they miss our marketing communications they won't know the feature exists.

Your solution

There are several potential solutions, but the important part is to create a notification users can see that is tied to their app context.

We might consider:

• automatically opening the menu or context and highlighting the new button/option/feature
• adding a banner with link to the relevant KB article concerning the feature
• in-app notification with instructions on accessing the new feature

We may wish to implement this only after we've enabled in-app notifications based on usage.

[mkdir-washington-edu]

Depending on how we solve the problem for only serving up notifications for specific contexts, we may want to also review this feature request: https://github.com/hypothesis/support/issues/125