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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.

It's a small thing. But after I was told that one of my help articles looked sloppy, I realized that consistent screenshot width throughout a help article is important.

One of the worst parts about using screenshots in your documentation is getting rid of sensitive information that you don't want showing up in your documentation. This could be names, email addresses, or anything else you don't want showing up.

How do you know if your online documentation is making an impact? How do you know what you need to improve? In this article, we are going to give you a a few questions you can use to evaluate how well your documentation site is prepared to help your customers.

One of the most overwhelming tasks for a new documentation manager or customer success manager is knowing what content they need to create.

A few months ago we launched a survey to see what kind of impact ScreenSteps was having in the businesses and organizations that use it. We were interested in answering a few questions: Did our customers feel more productive? Did they feel like they were creating better documentation? Was ScreenSteps helping them improve their business or organization?

It’s time to put your product documentation on the web We have been telling companies for a long time that they need to move their product documentation out of PDF and Word files and onto the web. This has been true for awhile, but over the last 12 months we have seen the number of companies doing this start to increase. Here are a few reasons why it is more important than ever to move your product documentation to the web.

Your boss just told you, “We need to do some product documentation. Can you look into that?” It can seem like a simple task at first but quickly gets overwhelming. We speak with a lot of people who have just been given the task of recommending a documentation strategy for their product and they aren’t quite sure where to start. Hopefully this article will help you out a bit as you try to break the task down into manageable chunks.

Are you making these common documentation mistakes?

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.