Help Center Redux: Making a Content Designer
Background
With minimal content staff and a highly productive product team, our Help Center had been neglected to the point of being inaccurate, hard to read, and not particularly helpful. I leveraged an available and eager resource in a Support staffer who had expressed interest in Content Design. I was able to mentor her through the steps of content development. Not only did we successfully redesign a tattered Help Center, but developed a stronger process for content development that could scale for future product launches.
Process
Core resources and mentorship
E. came to me to learn more about Content Design. Her background and role at Level had been as a support agent, but she clearly wanted to do more. She and I met a number of times, and I showed her examples of my work, explained the basics of Content Design, and gauged her interest.
With a new product launch as a forcing function, revising the Help Center was a P0. Short on resources, I turned to E. and asked if she was ready to expand her role. With the permission of her manager, she took on the new responsibilities.
Starting a competitive audit
Arming her with an example of a competitive audit I’d done, I assigned E. to conduct one of her own. Together we established:
Audit set (the products, companies and services to be studied)
Core goals of the audit
Elements to assess
I also gave her a general template and outline to follow: distill key takeaways, determine how the audit would impact the work we’d do next.
Building the plane while flying it
While we were planning for a future state with research and principles, we also had a lot of work to do on the current Help Center. Setting up a collaborative Google doc, we worked on a system to denote what we were changing, and what was staying the same.
The first pass was done to make all the content more accurate, more accessible, and more user-friendly. As I gave direction, I also got to teach E. and give her more resources about accessibility, about core product experience, and UX principles.
Stakeholder management
With an update this robust, there was a lot of stakeholder management to consider: two PMs, a new marketing team, plus legal. Just when we thought we were ready to launch, we’d be put on pause. This was an excellent lesson for E., and I made sure to set up the expectation that the iteration and surprises were just part of the process. I wasn’t expecting to have to define the term ‘thrash’ to someone just starting out, but I wanted to make it clear that it’s often the reality, especially at a start-up. My take is that incremental progress is still progress, and you often build better, stronger products (and relationships) by taking the scenic route.
Launch and iterate
Once the edits were done and compete for the interim launch, E. and I turned back to the competitive audit to determine the findings and how best to apply them. From there, we found our key takeaways, and turned them into core Help Center documentation, including best practices and a playbook for how to scope, write, iterate and launch future articles.
