In this article you'll learn:
• Why you may want to build a Custom Category
• How to create a Custom Category
• How to edit/remove any Category - Custom or Default
• How to create an Isolated Category & what they are used for
We're always keen to give you as many options as possible when working with our data and a big part of this comes in the form of our Category customisation features. Previously we gave you the ability to hide & save certain Topics for easier recall and analysis, however, with custom Categories you now can build groups of Topics and track them alongside other key metrics.
Why Build a Custom Category?
As you will have seen throughout your dashboard, we have 20 pre-built categories set up to help you break down your community interactions and find key information quickly.
These have been built by looking at a wide set of game data to determine what people talk about when they talk about games online. They feature everything from problems encountered in the game to feedback on the User Interface.
However, no matter how many games we include or how we build these categories, you might want to listen for something else. That's where the custom Category system comes in, with this system you can add your very own categories, hide or rename existing ones and isolate them to see the true impact of a certain subject on your data.
How to create a Custom Category:
There are two ways to start creating custom Categories and it depends on whether you know what you are looking for or not.
If you know what Category you would like to create, head to your Hub page and navigate to the "Dashboard Customisation" tab. Select your game from the dropdown and navigate to the "Custom Categories" tab. At this point, you should see the following...
From here, enter the title of your new Category into the input box on the far right of the screen and select the "Add Category" button (ignoring the 'Isolated' checkbox).
Once created, you'll find your new Category inside the Category sub-menu and all other places where the Categories are displayed (Most Discussed Categories, Topic Tables etc...).
As mentioned earlier, there is another way to create a custom Category and that is from within the individual Topics themselves. Let's say you are browsing through the Topics from this week and see a Support-related Topic appear. We don't currently have a default Category for Support so a custom Category is needed.
To create a custom Category from within the Topic page, simply navigate to the action menu in the top right and select "Assign Topic to New Category" (see below). Upon clicking on this option, you'll be presented with a modal box that looks similar to the one found on the Hub page. Complete the fields and click the "Create Category" button to create the new Category. You should then see the Category appear within the Category sub-menu similarly to the above.
Editing or Removing a Category:
Once you've created your custom Category, you may want to edit it or remove it once you have finished completing your analysis. To do this, head to the Hub page, go to the Dashboard Customisation tab in the left-hand panel and then select the "Custom Categories" tab. This should present you with this view...
To edit the name of a Category, simply select the icon under "Edit Name" to the right of your custom Categories. This will change the Category to show an input text field and you can change the name of the Category. Once done, select the tick icon to save the change.
To remove the Category, simply click on the bin icon. This will remove the custom Category from across the dashboard for that game.
With the new customisation system, you can also hide or rename default Categories. We hope that this will give you a way to ensure any overlapping Categories match with your internal reporting. To hide a specific default Category, navigate to the "Default Categories" tab within the Dashboard Customisation panel of the Hub page and then select the eye icon, selecting it should make the icon more transparent and now have a line through it. This represents the default Category being hidden.
In the above example, the user has hidden Account and Community from the set of default Categories on display. When hidden the Category no longer displays in the sub-menu or across the dashboard for that specific game.
To edit the name of any of the default Categories, simply select the edit icon to the left of the hide icon. Similarly to the Custom Categories panel, this will allow you to change the name. When done, click on the tick to confirm your changes.
Isolated Categories:
The final area to cover in our Category customisation set of features is the Isolated Category. This is a bit of a special setup that is useful in some specific examples. The two that we've seen existing clients struggle with are: you're introducing a new game launcher and experience extremely negative reactions from your existing player base & you have large parts of your community talking about modded content quality.
Both examples are related to your core game but neither represents the actual quality of your game. The discussion about each subject is independent of your game, however previously, it was all being collected and aggregated within Player XP. This meant that your average sentiment was being impacted by a discussion unrelated to your game.
To help combat this, we've introduced the ability to Isolate certain Categories. Taking our earlier example about modded content, we could do a Topic search for "Mods" or "Modded" and see the Topic containing a significant discussion. Then to make the Topic its own Isolated Category, we simply click on the Topic action menu and select "Assign Topic to New Category" as if we were creating a new custom Category. Doing so should give you the following Modal on the screen...
Instead of just clicking the "Create Category" button as normal, make sure the "Isolate Category?" checkbox is ticked and then click the button. Once done, you should see a new menu option appear on the navigation for Isolated Categories with your new Category found within.
Now you've done this, all references to the Topics found within this Category have been removed from the aggregations across the dashboard. If you're experiencing a sudden surge in negative comments about a specific subject, isolating it will likely increase your overall sentiment as they are no longer included in the aggregation.
Unlike our "Remove Topic" feature, where the Topic is completely removed, once Isolated you can go in and view the actual sentiment and other aggregations you typically expect to see within a Category page. This allows you to keep an eye on the volume and nature of the discussion taking place without affecting your overall sentiment score.
Oh, and it works well if you are being review-bombed and want to see through the noise...