What's the recipe for the perfect knowledge base article?
The purpose of a knowledge base is to provide your employees with quick access to articles that answer their questions and help them perform tasks. You know your employees will need to reference your job aids, guides, and procedures on a regular basis.So, you want to format your knowledge base articles in a way that makes it easy for end-users to read the first time they perform a procedure and the 100th time.
But, how do you strike a balance of writing an article for someone to use the first time vs the 100th time? Do you have to write separate articles?
As the Director of Transformational Services at ScreenSteps — a knowledge base company — I've coached content authors on how to write articles to support employees with different levels of experience without needing to write the same procedure twice.
In this 1-minute video, learn about ScreenSteps tools that help you write one article that supports employees who are following a guide for the first time as well as employees using a guide for the 100th time.
It is tricky to strike a balance of providing enough information for new employees while not crowding your guides with basic information that your experienced employees already know.
When you have the write authoring tools, it makes it easier to provide the right amount of information for every level of experience within the same article.
With ScreenSteps, we include formatting options like foldable sections, pop-up links, and interactive decision trees so that you can create guides that are helpful the first time you read it and the 100th time you read it.
New readers can click options to get more information. And experienced readers can skip those sections if they already have that knowledge.
See how ScreenSteps authoring and formatting tools can help you write knowledge base articles that will get more use.