Your product documentation may not be as exciting to you as your product itself, but it’s just as valuable.

If you are a programmer, entrepreneur or a product manager, it’s the product that you always think about and rightly so. But I propose that your product documentation is part of your user’s product experience.

Imagine a user’s path from awareness of your product, research on your product, purchase, and on-boarding. Do you realize that your documentation could have a great influence on your users multiple times during this initial path? Shocked? Yeah, it was at this light bulb moment that Helpie WordPress Documentation plugin was born.

Helpie helps you make an excellent documentation for your product and gives you actionable insights that will improve your user’s product experience, reduce support time and enables you to find new opportunities to enhance your product.

Here’s how you can use your product documentation made with Helpie as a sales tool:

  1. Write about solutions to user’s problems
    Of course, you can use Helpie documentation plugin to write about how a specific feature works. But you can go further by writing about how your product solves a particular problem that users’ have.Writing about the user’s core problem and how your product solves it, is more attractive to your user than just talking about features.

    Stripe is an excellent example of how to do this well. Their docs are so well written that there are a lot of users/developers who use their product just because of their docs.

    Makes sense, doesn’t it? Just look at their docs, and you can see that as a developer looking for a payment gateway, it answers all your concerns and reservations.

    Easy decision to become a Stripe User.

  1. Get feedback
    Product documentation is an excellent place to get feedback for your features. With Helpie’s voting system and comments section, it’s super easy for your users to share how they feel about a specific feature.Helpie has 2 types of voting feedback:

    Emo voting :

    Your users can show you if they ‘love’, ‘smile’, ‘meh’ or ‘frown’ at your article. Every product needs to know what the emotional response its users have towards it, Helpie gets you exactly that.

    Ii. Classic voting:

    For a technical or internal documentation, you can choose the classic voting and let your users/team show their like or dislike.

  2. Search Engine Optimisation
    Your Helpie powered documentation is an excellent way to get Google’s attention to your website. Just write the best documentation that’s relevant to your users and Google will make sure to send a truckload of traffic your way.

What should you have in your Product Documentation?

Important things to have in end-user documentation:

  1. User Guides:
    Your product documentation should contain guides for users to achieve specific results keeping in mind user’s flow in your product. Some common user guides include user onboarding guide, integration guides, etc.
  2. Troubleshooting:
    Most typical issues that users have and how to troubleshoot those issues.
  3. Product Vision:
    Your docs are also excellent to share your product’s vision, roadmap, etc. with your user.
  4. FAQ:
    Frequently asked questions about your product, pricing, etc.

Developer documentation:
Helpie’s code snippet highlight shortcode helps your API, and standard developer documentation looks cool and makes it easy for your users to copy code.

Internal team documentation:
You can use Helpie to create internal documentation for

  1. Getting started guide for your recruits

Ii. Environment docs

Iii.  Coding standards

Iv. Branding & Design Guidelines

Who’s responsible for your Product Documentation?

  1. Support
  2. Product Managers for specific products

How Helpie can help you build a better product documentation

  1. User Access Control by Topics/Categories:
    With Helpie, you can organize your documentation by topics. You can also control who can access or contribute to which categories.You can also password-protect topics and send passwords to specific users.
  2. Automatic Table of Contents:
    Helpie wants to make it super easy for you to create and your users to read your documentation, so it has an inbuilt Automatic Table of ContentsHow does it work?

    You just go on typing documents and add subtitles using HTML title tags ( h1, h2, h3, etc. ), and Helpie automatically converts them into links in the table of content. When your users click on those links, it takes them to the content under that subtitle.

  3. Frontend Editing:
    Who wants to go to WordPress dashboard to create or edit a new doc? No one ever! That’s why we added a neat frontend editing feature.Now, you and your users can add/edit your documentation articles right from the frontend.
  4. Insights:
    Helpie’s Insights is a game-changer, a secret weapon for your product’s success.Helpie Insights is focussed on:

    Making your users happy:
    Helpie Insights shows you, your most happy users, most unhappy users, and your overall user happiness score. You can use this information to talk to specific users, learn and improve your docs.

    Ii.  Help you improve your product:
    You can also learn which articles people love and those that people hate. Helpie also gives you insights on searches in your documentation knowledge base which you can use to find a missing feature or add a documentation article for that feature and hence get it used more.

  5. Docs search:
    Helpie’s search is miles ahead of any other products in the WordPress Documentation plugins’ category.Why?

    Helpie’s search is super fast even with thousands of articles. Yes, we did test this with thousands of articles.
    Ii. It can do partial keyword search
    Ii. It searches titles, content and even tags.
    Iv. It has a Keyword density weighted score, which makes sure more relevant content comes up at the top.

Helpie is an excellent addition to your toolbox of success. Try Helpie’s product demo for free.

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