Introducing Support Beacons on the OSF: Help at Your Fingertips

We’re thrilled to announce a pilot of our new OSF Help Beacons, designed to make your OSF experience even smoother! These beacons, a feature of our support desk technology from Help Scout, will appear in the bottom right corner of your screen on the dashboard, preprints, projects, registries and search pages. They offer targeted help guides, quick tips, and even video walkthroughs to assist you as you work.

Why Beacons?
We know that finding the help that you need quickly is critical. With the OSF Help Beacons, you can access help right where you need it, whether you're uploading a preprint, navigating your dashboard, or refining your search. The beacons will provide the most relevant resources for the page you are on or workflow you are working with, and you can search all guides from the entire OSF Support Center as well. Beacons also include a video that describes the context or value of each workflow or a workflow walkthrough. 

“Having direct links to support, both text and video based, in the help tool is going to make navigating OSF even easier for new users.  As a librarian, I love anything that makes this already great tool easier for my users.”
         - Claire M. Curry, Ph.D, The University of Oklahoma 

How Can You Help Us Improve?
COS has leveraged the OSF Support Beacons to improve your research lifecycle experience and to maintain our relationship with our user community. The beacon technology enables out team to continually adjust the location and content of these resources, and above all else we want to use your feedback to make the beacons even more valuable for current and future users. Each beacon includes an option to fill out a quick survey, letting us know how helpful the tool is and any improvements you’d like to see. This is just the beginning—your input will guide how we expand the beacons to other areas of OSF.

“The best way to improve the OSF is to understand our users. We genuinely want to hear your feedback on how we can improve and better support your open science research!”
          -Daniel Steger, Technical Community Manager, COS

What’s Next?
After this initial launch, we’ll evaluate the feedback and make adjustments to better serve you. Stay tuned as we bring the beacons to other pages across OSF!

Try it out and let us know what you think here. If you would also like to talk to our team about more of your OSF experiences and requests, sign up for a meeting with this form.