Software User Guide Examples

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Howeverunclear or confusing user documentation makes customers angry, throws doubt on the quality of the rest of the product, and negatively impacts future purchases with the company. The stakes are high when it comes to delivering valuable user documentation for your customers.

Providing helpful user documentation could make or break the customer experience. It helps customers get the most out of your product or service and offers a viable alternative to contacting the customer support team.

New users are much more likely to successfully onboard with your product if you provide them with informative user documentation. They can spend time browsing the docs and learning how the product works.

When customers have user documentation to rely on, this results in fewer calls and emails to your customer support team. Lightening the load on the customer support team means costs are lowered and you can help more customers with fewer agents.

Agents are freed from dealing with mundane, repetitive queries and have more time to help those customers who need it. And when you have user documentation available, support agents can just point customers to relevant articles, and significantly shorten the time it takes to resolve their issue.

When you document your product properly this can guard against customers using it wrongly. If you provide adequate warnings against incorrect ways to use your products then this means your company is less likely to become the recipient of legal action.

When prospective customers have access to your user documentation they can find out more in-depth about how your product works, and this can help them in their purchasing decision. It also creates a good impression for customers because it shows that you will support them after the sale.

Even better, when having conversations with your customers your sales team can refer to the documentation. This helps sales reps have more meaningful conversations with customers about the product and improves the likelihood that customers will buy.

You need to have a clear picture of who your customers are before you start writing any documentation. You may find that your customers are a diverse bunch and your documentation is catering to different needs.

When you have a clear idea of who your customers are, you can target your documentation and make it easier to use. You can pitch the tone of your writing at the right level so it resonates with users, and provides them with enough information to accomplish the task.

Formatting your user documentation as step-by-step instructions means your content will be accessible to your customers. Instead of presenting users with a long wall of text, step-by-step instructions are laid out so that customers can follow one step at a time. This keeps them engaged in the task and avoids distraction.

A picture is worth a thousand words. Make your documentation more interesting for your customers by providing images, videos, and GIFs. Documentation that is broken up with images and video is a lot more inviting to users than a daunting wall of text.

Sometimes it will just plain be easier to show how something works using a visual representation, and you owe it to your customers to convey information in the most convenient way possible. Describing something in words can be a lot more difficult than simply providing an image that represents the same thing.

The advantage of having online user documentation is that you can make it searchable for your customers. Being able to search for a keyword in your documentation makes it easy for customers to instantly find what they need instead of wasting time reading through an entire manual.

As well as searching for content within your documentation, customers will also be looking for particular sections within individual articles. This is where a table of contents can come in really handy.

A table of contents appears at the beginning of an article and lays out all of the sections contained within the document. Customers can click through to the section they feel is most relevant to them rather than having to read the whole article from beginning to end.

When writing your user documentation your content is likely going to need wider context to explain certain terms, or to go into more detail about a particular aspect of your product. The best approach here is not to repeat yourself but instead link to relevant articles that your customers may find useful.

With Document360, you can take advantage of our broken link checker, which helps you validate and monitor all links within your knowledge base. Instantly fix all broken links and provide a better reader experience for your customers.

You need to find out whether your user documentation is actually helping your customers, and the best way to do that is simply to ask them. Documentation should not just be a barrier to prevent customers from contacting human support. It should be a viable alternative to your support team and stand a good chance of solving their problems.

Stripe has some of the best documentation around. Stripe has a clean and uncluttered interface, immediately welcoming customers to the docs with a prominent search bar. It presents handy guides for users who want to dive straight into learning more about Stripe.

Then, you can learn more about business operations and financial services with Stripe. The large and simple images that accompany each section invite customers to explore the knowledge base and get more out of their subscription with Stripe.

Stripe has a huge amount of documentation to organize and they do a good job of hiding unnecessary elements on the page. When you navigate to the page level of the documentation, a left-hand navigation menu opens up which shows you all the pages in that category.

They have some outstanding documentation to help their users get to grips with their technology. The first page of their knowledge base is a Getting Started guide that onboards new users and tells them what Whatfix is all about.

Whatfix has invested in a Getting Started video to explain to customers how to use the software. They are aware that many customers may be new to the concept of a Digital Adoption Platform and have taken great pains to explain what they are.

On an individual article page, Whatfix gives users the option to request a demo. This reflects the fact that many of their documentation users are likely to be prospective customers trying to learn more about Whatfix.

Microsoft has a huge amount of documentation to organize and they take the approach of offering a search bar right on the homepage. They make suggestions for what users can search for, including articles, training, and code samples.

Microsoft knows they have a wide range of users to cater for so they list their documentation by product. This helps customers who know what they are searching for and is a good way to organize content.

At the individual article level Microsoft keeps all articles in the category displayed on the left-hand navigation so users can orient themselves. On the right-hand side, they have a table of contents so that users can see all sections of the article and jump to the right place.

When you get down to the category level Twilio opens out a left-hand navigation menu that shows you all the articles contained in that category. You can rate the page out of five stars using the widget in the top-right-hand corner.

The Canva developer docs have a very clear interface and a small search bar in the top right-hand corner. The homepage of the docs site is a simple overview of the content contained within their knowledge base.

When you get to the end of a page you have the option to switch forwards or backwards to other content in the user documentation. You can rate the helpfulness of the page, providing valuable feedback for the Canva team.

At the individual article level, the interface is simple and clear, with minimal distractions for customers who are reading the documentation. Netflix links out to other articles that might be helpful and offers a list of suggested articles that might enable users to solve their problems.

At the bottom of the article page, Netflix asks its customers to rate whether the article was helpful or not. They also include links to how customers can get in touch with a human, either by calling the company or starting a live chat.

User documentation is critical if you want to sell a successful product or service. Customers expect it, and your support team needs it. Good user documentation is simple to use and easy to follow, enhancing the customer experience and keeping customers coming back for more.

Technical documentation encompasses a larger range of topics than user documentation. Technical documentation can be both internal and external, but user documentation is always developed with the end-user in mind. In comparison to technical documentation, the process of developing user documentation necessitates a minimum technical background.

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