Was this helpful? — article votes
A yes/no at the foot of every published article.
By HeyThula · Updated
Every published article ends with Was this helpful? and a Yes or No. Readers can answer without signing in or leaving the page.
Why the question is so blunt
One question, two answers, no comment box. Anything more thorough gets answered by fewer people, and a signal from many readers beats detail from a handful.
It's a smoke alarm, not a diagnosis: it tells you which article to look at, not what's wrong with it.
Reading the results
A stream of No on one article is the useful signal. Something is wrong with that page in particular — usually that it doesn't actually answer the question its title promises, or that it's out of date.
A low response rate is normal. Most readers vote on nothing. Don't calculate percentages from a handful of votes or compare articles with very different traffic.
Yes votes are weak praise. People vote Yes when a page worked; they vote No when they're frustrated. Treat No as the informative one.
What to do about a No-heavy article
Read it back against its title. The usual causes, in order:
The title promises more than the article delivers — the reader arrived expecting an answer that isn't there.
It's stale — the product changed and the article didn't.
It's actually two articles, and the reader wanted the half you didn't write.
Votes and the AI
The AI answers from the same articles your readers are voting on. So an article collecting No votes is likely also producing weak AI answers, quietly, in conversations you never see.
Fixing it improves both at once — which is the general pattern with the help centre: one piece of writing, several places it pays off.