Over the last few years it has been interested to see the increased focus on self-service support options. Not too long ago, most knowledge bases looked like a glob of text vommitted out into some sort of wiki. Knowledge bases were ugly and, in most cases, ineffective at helping customers help themselves.

The old knowledge base template was a little outdated, and looked like this: Which is fine, if you like that that look. But some of you mentioned that it was too text-heavy and difficult to navigate through when you had a lot of documentation (and many of you have A LOT of documentation... like, over 400 articles). So, last week, we released a new template to make your knowledge base a little snazzier looking.

Once your knowledge base moves beyond a few FAQs, you will quickly start wondering about how you should organize your B2B software knowledge base. Many companies still implement a very flat structure in an attempt to organize their knowledge base — which is just a list of articles with no hierarchy to them. If you take this approach, you're really just relying on the search feature of your knowledge base since that's the only way anyone is going to find anything. A flat structure will make it very difficult for your customers to browse your knowledge base.

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quickly becomes a disorganized mess: The articles you really need aren't getting written The articles you have are out of date You have no process for creating or curating your content So we thought it would be helpful to share our process for creating help articles.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.