The Right Tools for Online Documentation

For any software product you develop and market, an exhaustive body of documentation is required. To create it, you need to implement a lot of features, from screenshots and videos illustrating how to use it to live chats and surveys for consumers. To achieve this, you’ll need technical documentation tools that… 

Write and Review Easily

When you write a novel, you apply your creative style. When you write technical documentation, you follow the guidelines. Authoring includes writing, editing, and designing. Not only should the documentation correctly describe the features of the software. It needs to be written comprehensively, formatted the easiest way for readers to perceive it.

Keep in mind the final aim of these works. Customers have questions about the usage of your product and want answers. They may have trouble with your product and need a troubleshooting guide. Finally, they may search for personal support when it gets serious. They should be able to find it all in your customer documentation. As for internal documentation, it should contain everything developers have to highlight about their work.

Work in Teams

Creating documentation is a long process that involves numerous writers, editors, designers, managers, etc. The developers of your product itself also need to be within your reach to clear any misunderstanding about new features and fill the writers in about new features in the upcoming versions.

To effectively schedule the work, the manager needs special tools for:

• assigning tasks to employees
• setting deadlines
• establishing dependences
• creating subtasks

and so on. They should be integrated with editors and cloud-stored documents for easy sharing and reviewing and exchanging comments and edits. A built-in messenger is also a great thing for avoiding sharing links and files outside the environment. Finally, adjustable access can grant team members the possibility to edit or review the relevant documents.

Style Rules

It’s now a must that your documentation portal is integrated with the software in all the possible ways, including style. Your company logo, the color scheme, the fonts used – a transition between the product itself and the documentation should be as smooth as possible.

On a subconscious level, it seems a logical extension of the product. But it requires a lot of conscious effort from creators. So, the documentation creating tools need to have designer features, so you can design your documentation the most organic way. Or design it elsewhere, with your favorite software, and then import. 

Listen to Your Heart

But after all, if you are in a position to choose the software, try to decide whether you feel it intuitively. Do all the icons and tools belong where they are? Is it easy to work with it, to create documents, schedules, timelines, to import documentation from other platforms, or to export them as a web help portal that you’ll host on your company site? If yes, this should be your choice. This inner voice responds like that of your customers’ will.