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Update on Khoros Rebranding and Agent UI Refresh

Khoros Alumni (Retired)
In early May, we announced exciting news that the user interface of Khoros Care (formerly Lithium SMM/Response) will be getting a visual refreshYour agents will see the updated UI when they log in on Thursday morning, July 25th. We expect the update to be released to all customers during the standard update window on Wednesday evening, July 24th / Thursday early morning, July 25th, depending on your region.

Why we are making this change
  • While many users love the Care user experience (UX), we have gotten feedback that the interface (UI) looks a bit outdated.
  • We want to improve accessibility, which requires some changes like larger font sizes and AA compliant contrast for low vision.
  • We need to rebrand the UI from Lithium to Khoros. 
What to expect
With this updated Care UI, you'll notice that the platform feels more modern, more accessible, and more aligned with our new Khoros branding. However, the changes are light, visual enhancements (details below), and will absolutely not change the UX layout or disrupt agent workflows.
 
These are the specific enhancements you will see in the updated Care UI (full screen preview here) on July 25th: 
  • Slightly larger font sizes and more legible text, following AA standards
  • Better contrast with at least a 4.5:1 contrast ratio for text
  • Fewer gradients
  • Cleaner buttons
  • Better accessibility, improving our overall WCAG2.0 compliance, which helps reduce eye strain for users in the platform all day
  • Style changes that match our Khoros brand look and feel
  • The navigation bar at the top will change to a darker color and display the Khoros logo
Key Takeaways
The Care UI update does not change the orientation of buttons, layouts, functionality, and most importantly, efficiency (full screen preview here). Agents will simply enjoy a more modern and accessible UI, with all buttons and UI elements in the same location.

There is no change to the login URLs on either .response or .app:

https://customer.response.lithium.com/account/login
https://customer.app.lithium.com/#/login
 
We hope you are as excited about these enhancements as we are! If you have feedback on these changes, we would love to hear it.
Tags (3)
18 Comments
Mentor

Hi Sheetal,

Since the update is going to be happening tomorrow. Should we be aware of anything? 

Khoros Alumni (Retired)

An update on the new UI...

To ensure a smooth rollout, we have made the decision to postpone the update by a few days. The updated UI will now be available when agents log in on the morning of Tuesday, July 30.

We expect the update to be released to all customers during the standard update window on the evening of Monday, July 29 / early morning Tuesday, July 30, depending on your region.

If you have a separate development instance, it will be updated by Friday, July 26.

Khoros Alumni (Retired)

@sandy56006 as per my previous comment, the update has been postponed by a few days (until next Tuesday). 

As noted before, no action is required on your part to enable the new UI - it will automatically load when you first login after it been deployed on July 29.

If you have any feedback on the new UI, please add a comment here for review and discussion.

Khoros Alumni (Retired)

Quick update -- all development instances have been updated and live with the new UI. Production update is on track for early next week as announced earlier.

We look forward to your feedback.

Contributor
I hate the new interface black color at the top, it causes my team eye strain, and we need to keep seeing the screen. Can you please review this? This is not healthy..
Mentor

Hi Sheetal,

 

I wanted to have this new UI changed. This is very critical that it is affecting the eye strain of the agents to work on this interface. It's too bright, if we reduce the brightness, the font is very light. Very disturbing to be honest. All the agent & operations are not happy with the way it is affecting our production because of this eye strain. Please change it. Or at least give an option to switch it to a dark mode or something. 

Contributor
I agree with @sandy56006 @SheetalK please do something about this, thank you.
Contributor

I agree with everyone's comments above. The larger/different font + new color scheme makes its extremely difficult to differentiate our posts from the customers. Nothing but complaints from all of our agents this morning :S.

Anyway to make the font smaller, and colors slightly darker. Or have the option to toggle back to the old interface?

Contributor

The new skin placed over this has already given me a headache and I am 30 minutes into my shift. The color scheme in combination with the font make it very difficult to read, there is hardly any distinction between our posts and the client. The old scheme worked perfectly and I feel it didn't need to be changed. 

Contributor

I've got an issue and feedback with regards to the new UI update:

1) The issue: unable to post the edited content for forums community as the "save to community button" is not visible, and clicking anywhere else doesn't save it, nor does pushing enter as it only creates a space.

- the "save to community" button appears for a fraction of a second at times while clicking around the edit box, and saves at times (doesn't work always).


2) The suggestion: A darker background with light/white text would help take off the pressure from our eyes and look better too.

let me know if this could be done.
Thanks.

Khoros Alumni (Retired)

@carlos_rosa @sandy56006 @Cpantelis @matt1088 @Riddle_Decipher Thank you very much for your feedback on the UI, we do appreciate it.

Many of the changes were driven by accessibility reasons based on the research that our UX team did, including decisions around font size and using dark characters on light background.

Having said that, we are already looking into improvements based on your and other customers' feedback. Some of the items we are evaluating include:

  • Better visual distinction between author messages and brand responses
  • Adjusting text color for some of the main text elements to make it more readable (while still maintaining the contrast requirements)
  • Modify use of the cool-toned grey to help remove the blue light component to reduce eye strain
  • Identify opportunities to minimize white background where possible (again, while maintaining accessibility standards) to reduce the overall "brightness" (note that the old UI also had white background for the conversation view which made up for large portion of the screen)

We understand that this is a significant UX change, and are committed to iterate on the styling to help make the transition easier. As we make progress or have updates, we will post them here as well as communicate via usual means through your CS team.

P.S. @Riddle_Decipher your issue with the "save" button for community posts is a bug - please file a support ticket so we can investigate and fix the issue.

Contributor

Thanks for the update! Maybe offer a "theme" option and give a dark and a light theme that you can choose between to stay in compliance with accessibility standards. Just implement a toggle open between the old UI and the current? 

Contributor

Hey, it seems quicker so far. Can we change the "theme" of it? The customer response and user response theme colours are too close to each other. In the previous version the customers response was white and the user response was yellow. 

Ace
Hi Support Looking at the supplied thread it seems we are not the only clients experiencing the eye strain problem since the change as can be seen in examples attached below. I do not feel referring me to a thread to make a comment is taking the problem seriously enough!! The extra eye strain is causing headaches and discomfort to your agents, do you understand the implications on agent morale when they have to endure this the whole day? Please prioritize this with your development team and get it sorted!
Khoros Alumni (Retired)

@matt1088 due to significant differences in the underlying technology layer, it is not possible to provide a toggle between the old and new UI styling. 

@krisfelsinger  thanks for the feedback, and good to hear that you are finding the new UI performant overall. We are actively looking into making the distinction between author messages and brand response more prominent such that it is quickly apparent when viewing a conversation.

@oliviec2 as per previous comment in the thread, we are reviewing all feedback and considering possible improvements while still maintaining requirements for accessibility. 

Please stay tuned for further details as we determine the enhancements. 

Mentor

Hi @SheetalK 

Any update on the feedback that you received. Because the UI is affecting our production as the agent are getting very uncomfortable due to the new UI causing eye strain. 

 

I hope this is considered as a complaint since it is very annoying to use the tool since the update.

 

Awaiting for a change in the UI

 

Please communicate the TAT for the changes to take place.

 

Thanks!

Khoros Alumni (Retired)

@sandy56006 we have fixed a couple of rendering issues (related to internal notes and button on supervisor page) that will be out this week.

Our UX team has gathered the feedback so far, and is coordinating with a few more customers in order to make an informed decision and prioritize changes we need to make. Part of that investigation is also to determine any changes around the brightness effect.

As we finalize some decisions on what changes we plan to make, I will provide updates here along with any specific timelines.

Khoros Alumni (Retired)

Another update on the rebranding effort and agent view - in the September release that will be deployed this week, we. have made some changes to address the UX feedback from this thread as well as separate external communication from customers.

As detailed in the September 2019 Release Notes, we have made the following updates:

  • Darkened background for the Author Profile panel (right-hand side), as well as the Available/Assigned queues panel (left-hand side)
  • Changed light purple background for agent responses into a darker (and cooler) blue for easier visual distinction from author messages
  • Changed brighter purple to less-bright blue for various text, icons and tab selection indicators
  • More space between Available and Assigned queues along with a darker separator for better visual distinction between the queues

You can also check out a side-by-side comparison with a movable slider to see the current and new UX together.

The updates were designed to improve the contrast and reduce the "brightness" on the agent view from the lighter background that was previously across most of the page.

As always, we look forward to your feedback as we continue to iterate on this.