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How to Create Effective End-User Documentation

Create User Documentation

Today, every company is focusing on building the best-in-class products that are feature-rich, powerful, and intelligently designed to fulfill customer needs.

However, there is one crucial thing that most companies are missing out on and that is user experience.

Product success is essentially all about how easy it is for customers to use the product and solve specific problems.

That’s where user documentation comes into the picture.

User documentation can provide an instant fix to customers’ problems the moment they arise. It is like a centralized information hub with how-to videos, FAQs, and detailed articles on important topics to help customers put your product to the best use.

Let’s dive in and uncover user documentation in detail. As you move further down the blog, you will explore its benefits, how to create it, and how it differs from technical documentation.

Let’s get started!

What is User Documentation

User documentation is a one-stop information hub where customers can find all the help they need to make optimal use of your product or service.

With step-by-step walkthroughs, how-to videos, and detailed articles, the documentation helps customers install, set up, and use your product in the way that yields the best results. As a highly searchable and easily accessible platform, it also empowers customers to find quick solutions to any problems they face while using your products.

What Is the Difference Between User Documentation and Technical Documentation?

People often get confused between user docs and technical docs. Both are similar in the sense that they can be used to quickly find answers to questions and solve product-specific problems.

However, there are significant differences that distinguish the two from each other.

User documentation is designed for customers – to help them set up, install, configure, and use your product. It is written in simple language, assuming that customers don’t know a thing about the technicalities of your product.

On the contrary, creating technical documentation is meant for developers – people who create and maintain your software products. Since this document is built for the internal development team, it comprises articles on software architecture, API, and technical specifications of the software.

Read More: Best Online Documentation Software and Tools for 2024

Why Is User Documentation Crucial for Your Business?

End user documentation can significantly improve product adoption, customer training, and onboarding. Let’s uncover some of the key benefits you can expect from this documentation. 

1. Reduces Support Requests

Creating user documentation is a good way to reduce support tickets. With easy and instant access to critical product information, customers are relieved from raising tickets for every little issue they encounter when using your product. 

By putting customers in the driver’s seat, user documentation creates a conducive environment for real-time problem-solving. This eventually reduces the volume of tickets reaching your help desk.

2. Lessens the Burden of Your Support Staff

As the ticket volume reduces, your support team will have more time to invest in customer issues that are more critical and can’t be solved by user documentation.

With more time at their disposal, they will be better positioned to provide detailed solutions to customer problems and address them faster. This positively impacts your support team’s productivity as well as customer satisfaction.

3. Improves Product Adoption

Software products can be difficult to understand on the first go. With end-user documentation, customers will have a solid resource to refer to every time they are stuck with a feature or a particular step.

The documentation guides users through all the essential elements of your product, making it easy for them to address bottlenecks on their own and achieve maximum output. This is a great way to improve product adoption and user satisfaction.

4. Aids Customer Onboarding 

New customers can easily get disappointed the moment they face difficult situations while working with your software product. This is often the cause of customers switching to products that are easier to use.

With user documentation, you can make customers’ journey with your product a whole lot easier. Just embed user documentation in an in-app widget and handhold customers through every product feature and step they should take to achieve intended results.

Such context-relevant help enables customers to get familiar with your product faster without unnecessary hassles.

Read More: User Manual Software & Tools for 2024

How to Create User Documentation

Without further ado, let’s quickly jump into the process of creating user documentation for your customers.

1. Learn About Your Customers & Their Problems

Who is on the receiving end of this process? What problems are they facing and how your documentation can solve them? 

All these questions should be answered right in the first step. 

Step into your customers’ shoes to identify their preferences, interests, and previous association with your company. 

A deep dive into your target audience will help you understand the content you should be adding to your documentation and make informed decisions pertaining to the tone, voice, and terminology to use. 

Learn about the problems customers frequently encounter. 

Your sales and support team are the ones who are always on the frontline, tackling customer issues. They can provide you with eye-opening insights into what your customers really want, how familiar they are with your software, and the areas they find the most painful. 

Researching your customers will also equip you with information on why they need your software and what problems they are looking to solve, so you can tailor your content strategy to fit their needs. 

Another way to do your research right is through competitor analysis. Have a look at your competitor’s documentation and take a leaf out of its strategy and incorporate all the good elements in your own. 

2. Build a Solid Plan & Strategy

It’s now time to go all in and get your hands dirty!

So, after you have understood your customers, create a foolproof plan that defines the key stages of your journey, the structure of the content, and every other crucial element of your documentation. 

The plan should make a few things crystal clear to your team: 

  • The goal of your user documentation
  • Structure & format of the document
  • Publishing format 
  • Roles & responsibilities of your team
  • Due date of the project

This plan is not set in stone. The reason you should create a plan is to get a direction to put in the effort. You can always tweak the plan to incorporate changes as your project progresses. 

3. Build a Strong Team for Collaborative Authoring 

Next, you should bring on board a capable team consisting of subject matter experts, product developers, project managers, and other stakeholders who can offer their rich insights and expertise. 

Give your team a unified platform to share their knowledge and work collectively towards building meaningful articles. 

While collaboration is a great strategy to get faster results, it can also create misalignment and confusion if each team member’s role and responsibilities are not well-defined. 

That’s where user documentation software like ProProfs Knowledge Base can help. Its granular user access controls let you assign roles and permissions to users and groups, helping them work in harmony with full clarity. 

For example, based on the skill and experience level, you can allot the role of a contributor, editor, and administrator and help the entire team work as one family. 

Here’s a quick video to help you learn more about team collaboration using documentation tools. 

4. Set Up a Structure That Looks Logical 

Before your team gets down to creating content, you should have a simple and straightforward structure covering key categories and their subcategories. 

Being a comprehensive platform, user documentation should be structured well for customers to navigate to the desired page or article quickly. Without a structure, they will likely get lost in the information and come out empty-handed – a sheer waste of time and energy!

A structure in place will help your team organize information in relevant sections and follow a logical hierarchy with topics that seamlessly flow one after the other. 

The primary purpose of building a structure is to make it easy for customers to search and follow the information provided. 

Most documentation tools offer ready-made templates to help you fulfill this purpose with ease. Documentation templates come with a pre-designed structure, so you don’t have to do the heavy lifting, and you can rather stay focused on creating impactful content. 

online documentation

To further enhance the experience, you can have a home page and a table of contents with topic-relevant sections clearly listed. This will enable customers to jump from one page to the next effortlessly. 

Internal linking is another important strategy you can incorporate into your structure for seamless navigation and quick information discovery. 

5. Start Writing

Now that a structure is ready, your team can start filling in the categories with relevant information. 

A thumb rule to building excellent articles is keeping them as simple as possible. 

Simplicity is an ingredient that can make your documentation stand out from your competitors. What more do customers need than a document that’s detailed yet easy to navigate and understand? 

When writing content, remember a few hacks that will help you throughout the journey: 

  • Keep your paragraphs and sentences simple, short, and to the point
  • Avoid jargon as much as possible
  • Define technical terms and concepts right where they are used
  • Avoid large chunks of text as it can be overwhelming for readers

No matter how complex the information is, you always have the choice to break it down into simple sentences that make sense and are easy to follow. 

6. Review & Publish Your Documentation

Customers don’t take time to form brand perceptions. Give them a memorable experience, and they will remember you for a lifetime. Provide inaccurate, faulty content, and they will lose trust in your documentation, and by that extension, in your brand.

You don’t want that to happen, right? 

One of the easiest ways to prevent errors is by passing every article through multiple review cycles. Setting workflows can be of tremendous help here. 

All authors working on the content can set a review workflow process comprising pre-defined statuses such as – Draft, In Progress, Ready for Review, and Published. 

This system infuses transparency in the process and gives clarity around which articles are reviewed and which aren’t. 

You can even create a custom status to seek help from fellow writers or editors in editing the content. 

The status should be set as ‘Published’ only when articles pass all the stages of review. 

A simple way to ensure that only error-free content goes live. 

How to Create Effective End User Documentation

7. Monitor & Improve Article Performance

Lastly, you should keep a close eye on your document’s performance.

With your products developing and customer queries changing, your document should stay relevant and updated at all times. 

That’s precisely why continuously measuring and improving your document’s performance is essential. 

The best documentation tools offer a built-in reporting system that enables you to track performance metrics like failed and successful searches, poor and top-performing articles, broken links, and many others. 

Keeping an eye on these metrics will help you replenish your documentation with fresh content from time to time, thus keeping its relevance intact. 

You can easily identify what’s working and what’s not working in your documentation and accordingly generate new articles or modify the existing ones.  

Here’s a quick video that explains how you can measure reports. 

Ready to Set up User Documentation? 

Today’s customers like being self-reliant. They want everything – food, clothes, or help of any kind, in a few swipes and clicks. 

User documentation is one of the most effective ways to satiate customers’ need for speed. 

It provides instant answers to all their questions, relieving them from the conventional time-consuming calls and emails. 

Creating user documentation can be a breeze if you follow the steps given above. Start by understanding your customers, their needs, and pain points. 

Once you know what your customers really need, you can build a powerful strategy to guide your efforts throughout the process. Let teams work together on the document with combined synergy to ensure there are little to no errors and that every article gets reviewed before going live. 

If you are looking for a decent tool to get started, ProProfs Knowledge Base might be just what you need. It has ready-made templates, a rich authoring system, and an array of customization options to help you build a stunning user document.

Do you want a free Knowledge Base?

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About the author

Bryan Wills is a seasoned expert in knowledge management with over a decade of experience in the field. His expertise extends across various domains, including Security & Compliance, User Management, Knowledge Management, Software Documentation, and Customer Support. His writings not only reflect his deep understanding of these subjects but also offer practical solutions and strategies to help organizations enhance their knowledge management processes. Bryan’s work has been published in GetFeedback, CustomerThink, and Apruve.