| 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.