Helping the help pages
======================

:Authors: Ann Goliak
:Time:
:Session: http://docs.writethedocs.org/en/2013/conference/talks.html#ann-goliak-helping-out-customers-help-themselves
:Link:

Customer support and opinion terrorist at 37 Signals, and a former
librarian. The original product help pages at 37 Signals launched in
2007, and covered the four original apps: Basecamp, Highrise,
Backpack, and Campfire.

If you're a new user, you come to these pages, and you're an
undirected browser: you don't know what you don't know, and if you're
a brand new Basecamp user (or evaluator), will you know what "What are
the 'Your global feeds' on the Dashboard?" even means? The questions
were organized by the number of times they'd been clicked, and
unsurprisingly the questions on top stayed on top. If you're an
experienced user, you *might* be able to use the sidebar, but those
are labeled with nouns, so you have to understand the product
terminology.

The launch of the new Basecamp was an opportunity to start over again.
Goliak worked with Mig Reyes, a designer, to develop a help site that
was more visually engaging and which helped customers perform the
actions they *want* to perform.

The redesigned help uses Jekyll and provides "help guides" that give
users easy entry points into the content. Videos have a home, answers
can link to each other, and generally it's easy to discover the
content you're looking for.

That meant every member of the support team had to put together a
development environment. And that means XCode, Homebrew, git, ruby,
Jekyll, and other things. [OMG, it sounds AWFUL.]

After launch, they started to notice things seemed to be slowing down.
They found that the new help reduced tickets by 5%, which is
significant.