Patrick Bosek, from Heretto and Barbara Green, UX Content Lead at ACS Technologies explained that there was a lot of change happening in the product line with slow content production in wikis and PDFs. There was limited reuse and not scalable.
Started developing cloud-based software. Spent long hours as the product line expanded.
The objective was a holistic content operations ecosystem. Content team needed more control of our publishing environment. Getting no love from outside the organization.
The content had to serve multiple audiences with 4 user types, 3 faith profiles, and many versions of software. Then acquired 5 companies in a 2-year period, which included all their content.
Key content ops capabilities: personalization, content reuse, version control, push-button multi-channel, API delivery, and findability. Interestingly, personalization is one side of the coin where the ogther side is content reuse.
Just 10-15% reuse saved 225 hours per month.
The first step is moving to structure(d content). Scared to move to DITA, but knew we had to. Understood the value and knew it made sense. Initially limited to our newest (cloud) product. Along the way, revamping strategies, creating standards, right down to how we were going to name files and other assets. Used a conversion company for this step. Positives and negatives; it's messy.
Storing content at the time in a Git repo created friction with authors.
Next step was to bring in content management technology. Main concern about DITA was that it would be hard to hire qualified people. Needed a user-friendly tool. The tool needed to appeal to us as writers.
Then was launching the new website for content.
But help site v2 was a bit of a mistake. The design wasn't scalable as the company acquired more products.
A v3 design that was scalable didn't require re-authoring content because the content was already there and structured. It is now the single source of truth for 27 products. The documentation website is now 56% of the company's total web engagement.
Companies that don't build great help experiences can be leaving half of their customer interaction on the table. Companies invest millions in marketing site and a tenth of that on documentation sites. The Technical Publications department has this impact and should be getting the funding.
In a digital-first world, help sites are the first place most software customers look for issue resolution and source-of-truth.
The latest step was ti implement in-product help. One click takes users to information, including information, release notes, community, and chat.
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