One of the main problems growing B2B software companies have is determining who is going to write the documentation. Everyone knows it needs to get done. Everyone knows customers want it. Everyone knows it will improve customer support. But when it comes time to write the articles, everyone seems to respond, "Not me!"

This one simple tip will dramatically improve the effectiveness of your knowledge base articles: Make sure that your knowledge base article titles answer a question. An example will demonstrate why this is important.

Writing how-to guides and product documentation seems like it would be an easy task. But most support and documentation managers quickly find managing documentation is a real headache. What begins as an informal process of writing FAQs and knowledge base articles quickly becomes a disorganized mess: The articles you really need aren't getting written The articles you have are out of date You have no process for creating or curating your content So we thought it would be helpful to share our process for creating help articles.

We often get questions about using ScreenSteps vs. MadCap Flare or RoboHelp. I'm not going to go into a feature by feature comparison - both RoboHelp and MadCap Flare are very capable products and if you start listing all of the features, both will have a much longer list than ScreenSteps. The main difference between ScreenSteps and these other authoring tools is philosophy. Both Flare and RoboHep are built around the the idea of "documentation projects." A team or author using one of these products will go through everything you would do with a traditional project:

I was ready to checkout of Lowe's. On my way to the register, I noticed there were a few available machines at self-checkout, and considered skipping the line to scan everything myself.

Some people think that ScreenSteps is just about adding images to your documentation. But there is a lot more it can do. The video below highlights a few differences between the Zendesk article editor and ScreenSteps including: Applying image borders Revision management Auto-numbering of steps Annotation presets Image updating Step re-ordering

We're happy to announce a new and improved Zendesk integration. It now works with Zendesk Legacy AND Help Center, is a much faster setup, and has a tighter integration with Zendesk so that you can author everything in ScreenSteps.

1. Adapt for complex scenarios Some procedures are straightforward while other procedures include a lot of "if this, then that" situations. If your documentation needs to explain a complex procedure, make sure you account for all of those variations.

Since the goal of a how-to guide is to allow customers to help themselves, most businesses only think of documentation in terms of how it will impact their customer support. But your how-to guides and documentation can also communciate a lot about your business. Whenever I am getting ready to start using a new product or service, I instantly look at the company's help site. Granted, I develop online documentation software, so I am probably a bit more aware of this than others, but a company's help/documentation site can tell me a lot about what it will be like to work with them. Here are three things I know about you if you have a great documentation site: 1. You are organized I have never seen a disorganized company put together a great documentation site. A great documentation site sends a clear signal about how organized your company is. A great example of this is the Van Halen Brown M&M's. Van Halen used to have a rider in their contract that required the promoters to provide a bowl of M&M's with all of the brown ones removed. A lot of people thought this was just them being divas. But Snopes explains the real reason: