A few months ago I spent 3 hours searching on the help site of a major software vendor for a troubleshooting article that never was. Those 3 hours translated into 3 Tuesday afternoons. The person who wrote the articles is a technical writer and a colleague of mine. So, I know how to build a system to deliver such articles. But clearly that is not how customers use such systems. After a while I gave up searching for that article and called support. And after waiting 45 minutes on the line, I was able to talk to someone who helped me with my problem.
Most customers experience Tuesday for most customers. That three hours searching would have been an extraordinary experience had it resulted in finding what the author needed.
The gap between what companies publish and what users can actually find
Most organizations create a large amount of content (FAQs, PDFs, release notes, knowledge base articles, etc.) and are unable to make that content findable by their customers. Just because a company has created a lot of content does not mean that the content is good or that it will help customers. The amount of content created by a company is not the measure of success. The measure of success is whether or not the content that has been created actually helps customers.
Most companies today measure the success of their content by the amount of content they put out. So long as 200 articles were published last quarter then the team must have done a great job. But the real question is did any of it actually help to service the customers of that company. As I stated before the vast majority of customers using search on a company’s web site for information. The search query that they use will be very approximate for their initial searches and they will click through on the first couple of results. If those results do not help then they will be off to the support department.
Your content has to be semantically searchable. In other words, it has to be findable by someone who does not know in advance that they need it. The way to test this is to think of a problem that you would search for, type it into the search box on your own Web site, and then see what results you get. If you do not get what you need right away, then your content is not working hard enough for you.
Format is king, and so is speed
Before you start to work on personalizing the content for your customers, the content must be of good enough quality in the first place. A lot of the content that has been published today is of low enough quality and is only created to make life easier for the publisher, not for the customer reading it. This means that the content is too slow to load, not readable on mobile devices, or even worse, forces the customer to download a PDF in order to read a few paragraphs of content. Content that does not support customers is quickly identified by them and they will not be willing to put up any friction to use it. They will determine in a matter of seconds whether or not the content is going to be useful to them and abandon ship if they determine that it will not.
Format is a message. A big chunk of densely written text conveys a very different message to your customers than a well-formatted, easily-readable page of content with short paragraphs and clear headings. A page of well formatted content conveys the message that the author of the content thought hard about how to best present it to your customers, to make reading as easy as possible.
Personalization isn’t a luxury anymore
But most importantly, as users we don’t want more content, we want the right content at the right time. That means the content has to be personalized. As a writer this can be really challenging, because how do you know what the right content is? And even if you do know how can you deliver it in the right format to the right user at the right time? The biggest challenge of all is to resist delivering content that has been averaged down to some sort of middle ground. In other words, most companies try to deliver .
Documentation for Most Users is usually Middle of the Road. For First time users and Power Users of your software we can do better. Providing them with Contextualized Content, at the time and in the format they need it, can make all the difference between having a productive night or an sleepless night.
Personalization doesn’t have to be complex for mid-sized teams. In fact, even the smallest of changes can start to make a big difference.
- Role-based content filtering so enterprise admins aren’t wading through end-user basics
- Device-aware formatting that actually works on a phone screen, not just technically renders on one
- Contextual help that surfaces inside the product, where the user already is, instead of exiling them to a separate portal
- Progressive disclosure — give users the summary first, let them dig deeper if they want to
I did not intend to make this seem new or different from what organizations currently deal with when it comes to personalization in the multitude of services they use every day. Everyone uses personalization in search on streaming services, in shopping apps, in news aggregators, and in banking online. It is very disappointing to customers when they expect to find similar personalization in a company’s documentation and do not find it.
Modern documentation and support experiences improve customer success and reduce support costs
The company spent a lot of money on customer success, but for some reason the volume of support tickets doesn’t go down. It’s because the documentation is so terrible that users have to call support to figure out a problem that they had previously tried to find an answer to on the company’s web site. The customer on the other end of the line is going to be very frustrated with the organization.
If you’re looking to improve your documentation / support experience, understanding what modern content delivery looks like (structurally, technically, user experience) can be a very valuable exercise. Most teams have a huge amount of information that could be served up to customers in much better ways. And the biggest gap between “we have documentation” and “our documentation is reducing support tickets” is almost always an execution problem, not a content problem. The information is there somewhere. It just isn’t working hard enough for your users.
The following graphic highlights a number of differences that exist between most organizations and their customers:
| What companies often do | What customers actually need |
| Static PDFs updated once a year | Living content that reflects the current product |
| One-size-fits-all help articles | Role or experience-level filtering |
| Desktop-first design (maybe mobile-compatible) | Genuinely responsive across every device |
| Search that matches exact keywords only | Semantic search that understands intent |
| Content siloed from the product UI | Contextual help embedded where users work |
Accessibility is not optional
Accessibility for content delivery is often an afterthought for organizations with large documentation efforts. However, treating the approximately one billion people with disabilities around the world as an afterthought can have legal consequences. So treat your disabled customers with the respect that all your customers deserve, and implement the 5 aspects of accessible content delivery.
However, so many organizations have created content delivery that is not accessible to their customers with disabilities. Content is published on the web today in a way that does not support users who use screen readers to read web pages or who use the keyboard to navigate web pages. The same problems exist with documents and video. Organizations tout the quality of their content but in the end, quality does not matter if customers are unable to access the content in the first place. Making content delivery accessible to customers with disabilities needs to become a feature that organizations place a high value on.
What users are really telling you when they abandon your docs
Bounce rates, exit rates and support ticket topics are all data. Every time a user abandons your help content and calls a human to assist them with a problem, they are leaving a trail of data behind for you to follow. You can use this data to go back and figure out where you went wrong and how you can improve things for your customers in the future.
I want to add one final note here. Much of the published content within companies actually causes more problems for end users than it solves for them in terms of them abandoning the help content and calling for support. In order to address the volume of information and to provide a better end user experience, companies must focus on enabling better findability of information within their published content rather than trying to publish more information.
Users today are not more demanding than in the past. However, users have become much more attuned to what is possible with technology today. As a result, they are greatly disappointed by technology that does not measure up. What users cannot explain is that all interactions with a company should be as elegant and virtually frictionless as possible. Meeting these expectations is not about keeping up with trends or keeping current with the latest latest. Meeting these expectations simply means that a company respects the time of its customers.
