We are happy to announce that starting on Thursday, August 31, 2017 you will now be able to set article viewing permissions on a per article basis.

If you are building a knowledge base for customer support or for internal training, then it is important to keep in mind what you want the article to accomplish. In a perfect world you could write one article and use it for training, onboarding and support. And this is the approach that many people take. But it is a big mistake. When someone needs to be trained, their needs are very different from when she need to be reminded. The person who is being trained needs to understand concepts, definitions and workflows. The person who just needs a quick reminder only needs a quick step-by-step guide.

Oh, the all powerful PowerPoint Deck. PowerPoint is a part of almost every training event you will deliver or participate in. Whether it be live, a webinar or an e-learning module PowerPoint will probably be involved in some part of the process.

About a year ago, we started grappling with the problem of long articles. Sometimes, a short article just wouldn't cut it--you need a lengthy onboarding guide or a long procedure that has a lot of content. The question became, "how can one best present lengthy content to the end user?" Because if articles are too long, they force the reader to endlessly scroll down the page. All of that scrolling can be confusing, and readers can quickly lose track of what they are even looking at. So we wanted to fix that. One option was to split the article up into multiple articles in a manual. This approach would let a reader finish an article, and then hit next. The problem we saw was that, often times, readers would either land in the middle of a lengthy process (from searching a keyword the knowledge base and clicking on an article), or they would get lost somewhere in the process and lose track of where they were.

A step by step guide that gives your customers a clear path to success can really boost your customer onboarding and success efforts. Here are a few tips for providing that clear path.

We will often see customers sign up for a trial without a clear idea of what their goals are. They know they have a general problem and they know that they need to do something but they have a tough time defining exactly what the problem or explains exactly how they plan on solving it.

A Clear Goal You cannot help your customers be successful unless they understand what their goals are. You probably didn't expect me to say that. You probably expected me to say that you can't help your customers be successful unless you know what their goals are. But that isn't totally true. If you have a low touch sales process and provide a lot for self-service information, a customer who has a clear goal in mind can be successful with your product without ever contacting you. But if they don't know what their goals are then the chances of them being successful with your product aren't very good.

1. Customer Onboarding Most enterprise software companies do one-on-one onboardings by either going onto the client site or by hosting a training via a web meeting. When I talk to our enterprise customers about using documentation in their onboarding they think that I am talking about replacing their current onboarding practices.

Our brains struggle to remember more than 5-7 things. We just aren't very good at remembering more than that. But our brains are very good at chunking information. Chunking information is the process where we break up large amounts of information into manageable chunks. It's almost like putting things into folders. Let's look at how this works with phone numbers in the United States. I live in Northern Virginia just outside of Washington DC. There are basically three area codes that I usually run into: 703, 571 (which are both in Northern Virginia), and 202 which is Washington, DC.

It didn't used to matter what your documentation site looked like. Gobs of text. No formatting. No design. They were awful to look at and nobody cared. But those days are gone. Today, the quailty of your knowledge base can play a major role in the perception of your company and your product. But making a great looking knowledge base can be tricky if you don't have the right tools. In this artilce I am going to outline 5 ways ScreenSteps makes you look great. 1. A beautiful knowledge base The first thing ScreenSteps will do for you is give you a beautiful looking knowledge base. What your knowledge base looks like is one of the trust factors your customers will rely on. When you have a great looking knowledge base your customers will have more confidence in your company.