Announcing Ideas (Beta)

We're excited to announce the release of Hitchhikers' "Ideas" – where any user with a Hitchhikers account can post new product ideas or upvote any existing ideas submitted by others in the community.

The Yext team is looking forward to seeing what you, as a member of our community, come up with and how you can help brands around the world continue to build amazing AI search experiences.

As a Hitchhiker, you can login to this feature via hitchhikers.yext.com/ideas. It is also featured in the navigation bar under Community. Once on the page, you can post new ideas, upvote, and comment on existing ideas. What's really special about this platform is that it is built entirely on the Yext platform with Knowledge Graph, Answers, Streams and Sites.

• Impact the Yext product development
• Access transparent updates on your requests directly from our Product Strategy department & learn about new releases (getting early access to Monthly releases)
• Inspire others
• Earn Hitchhikers points every time you participate by submitting, commenting, or upvoting an idea

Let's dive a little deeper into these:

We feel it's critical for the success of our products to hear from our users: we build better products with your feedback!

When you participate on the Ideas board, we take your input into consideration for our product roadmap. Once these new features are released, they're open for more input, creating a continuous feedback loop:

Participation can take on a few forms:

• Submit a new idea: Ideas can range from small changes to existing features to large new requests, and anything in between. Try to provide as much detail about your request, the impact and the use cases of the solution for you and your company.
• Comment on an idea: Have the same need but a different industry or use case? By commenting on an idea, you help our team get a level deeper and see the different perspectives for creating your new feature. Be descriptive when you comment on how a particular idea will help your scenario.
• Upvote ideas: this will help our Product team see which ideas are most important to the community as a whole.

The best part? This is your touchpoint directly to our Product team who will be responding to your posts directly on the platform.

Transparency and trust are important values at Yext. After building on the ideas you submit, we give you a transparent look behind the curtain at what's coming. We want you to be able to follow the progress on your ideas, hearing directly from our Product team for each respective product area.

We're looking forward to watching your ideas make their way into our releases! To learn more about the release process and how you can get early access to these features, check out the Product Release Cycle Unit in the Hitchhikers Track.

With this launch, we want collaboration to be at the forefront. The goal is to have our diverse community participate in the end to end process of idea generation, refinement, and prioritization. Be sure to explore your fellow community members' ideas!

As with other areas of the Hitchhikers Platform, we want to reward you for your insightful contributions. Every time you participate by either submitting, commenting, or gaining upvotes on an idea, you will receive points!

Earn:

• 10 points for submitting an idea
• 5 Points for commenting on idea
• 3 Points if your idea receives an upvote

Climb that leaderboard and start submitting!

When we set out to create a new feedback or product request portal, we evaluated several vendors. However, time and again, each one lacked the flexibility or components we needed. So we decided to build it in-house, using our very own Yext products.

Ideas is a combination of Yext Knowledge Graph, Answers API, Streams, and Sites*. We store each Hitchhiker's idea in the Knowledge Graph as an entity — when a user clicks the Submit button, it makes a call via our Knowledge API to create the entity. We also store the Hitchhiker user who submitted the idea and idea comments as separate entities. Using Knowledge Graphs powerful relational database, were able to connect these entities to one another easily. We use the Streams architecture to send this information from Knowledge Graph into the Answers experience you see on the homepage, which is built using our Answers API. Lastly, each idea has its own landing page, built with our Sites* product and we immediately kick off new page builds with each entity update.

*These pages were built using Sites which is available in a developer preview.

We had a lot of fun building this out and we hope you like it!

Review our guidelines and FAQs on Ideas here. If you have a feature request for Ideas, well…submit an idea!

Ideas is always on and we're ready for your feedback: go to hitchhikers.yext.com/ideas and start submitting!