For those of you who’ve been here before, you may have noticed the User Support Hub (USH) has undergone some changes that are summarized below. We hope these changes improve how you can use the site, and make it easier to find articles relevant to your needs.

Improved interface and design

We’ve implemented a number of design upgrades to make it easier for users to find articles they need and navigate around the USH.

Navigation Tool

A navigation menu is now available on the left side of menu and article pages. From there, you can access all categories, sections, and articles using the drop-down arrows.

Featured Articles

Another thing you may have noticed are “Important Articles for Workbench Researchers” that are displayed at the top of the page under the search bar. 

This section will list 2-4 articles containing time-sensitive and/or critical information relevant for most Workbench users (ie CDR releases, funding opportunities, etc) and will be updated monthly.

Featured Videos

This section near the bottom of the page will display 2-4 recent videos produced by the Workbench team. More videos are available in our Video category and on our YouTube page. 

Feedback

Please let us know if you like the new interface and navigation options. We’ll take them into consideration for future updates.

Public release

We modified the USH settings to make it publicly accessible. From a user perspective, this doesn’t change much, except now when you click links to USH articles (in emails or in an Office Hours chat) you won’t have to sign-in. In addition to making the site easier to use for Workbench users, we hope this will allow it to be better integrated with the Research Hub to inform potential users about the resources available to them before they start using the Workbench. We’re also separately hoping to better integrate the USH with the Workbench in the next few months.

Deactivation of the Community Forum

We deactivated the forum for the time being for a few important reasons. The main reason being that it was difficult for us to effectively track and manage questions, which sometimes resulted in unacceptably long response times for users. Additionally, for complicated questions that require input from our Data Science Team, it’s much easier to track them through Help Desk tickets than on the forum; using tickets therefore results in significantly faster responses for users. 

We may re-enable the forum in the future, especially if requested by users. This could be an effective tool to support the Workbench, especially as the All of Us user community grows in size and more users are available to assist one another. If re-enabled, we’ll limit forum use to registered Workbench researchers and make changes to ensure it will be a useful resource for the All of Us community.