How We’re Reorganizing 216 Articles in Our Help Center

No person needs to listen to they’re outdated… stale… or outdated. That’s precisely what we needed to face, although. All through the times, months, and years, our Assist Heart, the place we preserve updated articles about Buffer for our clients, had grow to be simply that.
Don’t get me fallacious, there’s a ton of nice content material in there. That’s the issue, although. There’s simply an excessive amount of, and the content material has began to grow to be much less and fewer reflective of Buffer: the product it’s meant to help.

There are 4 of us on the staff engaged on the Assist Heart, which is a part of our bigger 21-person Buyer Advocacy staff. We all know we are able to’t simply go in and edit every article because it stands. The change required is deeper than that. It requires us to rethink the complete construction, from our high classes, to how we merge and break up articles, how we help our articles with visible content material, and at last, how we current our article content material in a transparent and simplified approach.

We’re proper in the course of the method to totally overhaul (or, “revamp,” as we prefer to name it) the 216 articles in our Assist Heart. On this publish, I’ll clarify how we’re confronting this undertaking to keep away from what might in any other case really feel like an awesome initiative.

There are two essential causes we’d severely think about a undertaking this massive:

1. Our clients are now not being served by our content material, acknowledged by unsuccessful searches or direct suggestions;
2. We don’t imagine the expertise within the Assist Heart has advanced with our product.

For this alteration, we‘ve seen a little bit of each.

On the shopper aspect

We found via our use of Algolia that some primary search phrases didn’t lead clients to the best articles.

We additionally discovered that the integrity of our info lacked in some areas, with some cases of conflicting info. This was because of a number of articles crossing over the identical subject, however when that info modified, just one or two of the cases have been up to date.

Lastly, clients advised us that our content material wasn’t hitting the mark. Easy as that.

Ouch.

On the product evolution aspect

For those who’ve been a Buffer buyer for some time, you might need observed some modifications through the years. We regularly evolve our product to raised meet our clients’ wants. Nonetheless, whereas we furiously up to date our Assist Heart content material, its unchanging group grew additional away from what our product appeared and felt like.

Associated, with the intention to satisfy the wants of all clients, we uncared for the bulk use case. We stocked our articles full of each nuance and use case we might consider, resulting in very sturdy, however overwhelming articles.

This was in direct opposition to what we try for in our product: clear design and ease of use.

Whereas it’s necessary to get into the finer particulars and edit every article, it’s additionally necessary to zoom out to see how all of these articles are organized. We knew we wanted to totally rethink the highest-level subjects introduced on our Assist Heart in order that they extra carefully matched our product expertise.

Taking some nice recommendation from our Senior Design Supervisor, Martin Gloeckle, right here at Buffer, I began researching the Card Sorting train.

The Card Sorting train is a option to invite others (clients, workers at your organization, a spotlight group, and so forth.) to lend recommendation on learn how to set up your web site, store, or on this case, Assist Heart. After doing a little analysis and several other inside discussions, I went ahead and launched an open card sorting train internally.

There are a number of methods to conduct a card type, however in our case, we used the Open Card Sorting methodology. I created 70 digital playing cards, every with the title of 1 Assist Heart article on it. As I discussed earlier than, we’ve got 216 articles in our Assist Heart, however I selected 70 that I believed have been consultant of our content material.

I then discovered 11 volunteers, keen to take time alone to every type the playing cards (a.okay.a. articles) into classes that they named.

I’m at present in the course of sorting via the info that got here in from our 11 individuals. I stay up for supplying you with an replace on the way it went within the observe up piece I’ll write after we full this undertaking.

When confronting this initiative, it was clear from the beginning that we wouldn’t get too far by placing our articles on a metaphorical conveyor belt, splicing and zhuzhing till they completely aligned with the feel and appear of our product.

This may make every particular person article really feel nice, certain, however it wouldn’t have any have an effect on on how simple it’s for guests to navigate Buffer’s self-help.

As a substitute, I took the time to take a look at each article and group it into one or two classes that match the job-to-be-done (JTBD), equivalent to publish creation or scheduling posts, or the subject, equivalent to Instagram or the browser extension. This creates particular teams. From there, I assigned every group of articles to one of many two Assist Heart contributors engaged on this undertaking.

When it comes time to plan for the subsequent subject group, the assigned staff member and I meet to debate all the associated articles on that subject and to begin organizing a approach ahead.
These are a few questions we ask ourselves:

• Ought to any of this content material be merged to scale back our variety of articles?
• Which info is redundant?
• Which info is crucial to a buyer’s success?
• Ought to any articles on this grouping be created or archived?
• Is the data correct?
• Are we telling a transparent and correct story?

It’s messy.

This course of isn’t a kind of that makes you are feeling like a rockstar. As a substitute, you sort of begin by tromping round within the mud, and as you proceed speaking and pondering, you slowly wade your self out.

So, that’s it. Out with the outdated and in with the revised (that’s the saying, proper? 🙃)
I’ll have extra info and can share our learnings in one other article as soon as we get additional alongside on this undertaking; I stay up for sharing it with you in just a few months.

However first, I’d love to listen to from you. Have you ever tackled a messy, however needed undertaking like this one? I’d like to be taught from you within the feedback beneath.