It is common knowledge by now that our knowledge management product, Document360, was born after a Hackathon in 2017. It was a prototype that came out from the event that was later reviewed, developed, polished, and later launched as a full-fledged product. It is now the fastest-growing product in our portfolio.
Keeping in line with our organization’s aim to create an environment that would bring a culture of positivity and change to the developer mindset, we decided to recreate the 2017 experience in June this year. We had six teams who identified a problem or pain point and it took 32 hours to find a solution. Team Jarvis was declared the winner. Team Jarvis members included our Data Strategist, Selvaraaju Murugesan, Data Scientist, Pavithira Rajendran, Technical Lead specializing in UI & UX, Prabagaran Saminathan, Engineering Manager, Baskaran Vaithiyanathan and Software Engineer, Kameshwaran Sivarajan. The team came up with a product feature that will assess the article content on its ability to turn up in Google’s top searches, based on a few criteria and produces recommendations
Like in 2017 when the internal Hackathon led to the innovation of a whole new product that became a game-changer for Kovai.co, the 2022 Hackathon resulted in the innovation of a brand-new feature for Document360. The feature is called “Health Check Metrics”, the feature helps a writer understand the quality of their content. “We realized a lot of technical writers want feedback on the quality of the content,” said one of the team members, Selvaraaju. “We have also faced the same issue with our knowledge base articles, prompting us to build a tool or a feature that will rate the content, based on Google’s preferences and priorities,” he said.
A content or article is usually rated based on its readability, which in turn is rated on the density of words in a paragraph, the right number of words in a paragraph, the number of paragraphs, the length of sentences, etc. Search engine optimization is also another area of concern because many writers don’t know how their content will be indexed by the search engine. Hence the feature, helps them optimize their content for SEO.
A few things that Google prefers or prioritizes, is articles with meta-title, meta description—which is a brief description of the content on top of the article, images placed in between the text, alternate text instead of images, many internal and external links—which is believed to increase the credibility of the content and keywords which helps in the categorization of the article into multiple themes.
If the content is rated good, it means that it’s likely to turn up in the top 5-6 searches on google when the keywords are searched. The feature, released on October 29, rates the content in three steps—Problems, Improvements, and Good.
The feature first points out the obvious problems in the article like the above criteria missing, once those are sorted out, it suggests some improvements in readability and once those are also sorted out, it rates the content as good. Once the content is defined well, a technical writer can be confident to go ahead and publish their work.
Unlike most features and products that are inspired by customers’ feedback or demand, the latest Health check metrics feature is a classic example of a feature built by a team that drew from its internal inspiration and implemented its innovative skills. The idea was chosen for development, because the need for feedback or understanding how google looked at their content, is a major pain point most content writers face. It’s also a simple solution that helps writers improve their writing skills.
With this feature, writers can easily improve the quality of their content, which in turn drives traffic to their website and eyeballs to their product, information, or offer.
