Every page is page one for documentation

Content consumption habits have been drastically changed by the internet. It’s completely revolutionising how we structure user documentation, and content in general.

But what does it mean if Every Page is Page One?

Customers can be coming to your documentation from anywhere online. This may be from a search engine, your company website, your software interface, or a support email from one of your agents. You can’t guarantee that users will know what you want them to know when they find your content.

You also don’t know what qualification level your users are going to have, so you have to tailor your content to guide anyone who lands on it. Unqualified users must be passed onto relevant sources, and qualified users should be catered for by your content.

Mark Baker’s Every Page is Page One

A really interesting book and blog, Every Page is Page One, written by technical writer and consultant Mark Baker, defines exactly this concept for technical writers. It gives a nod to the challenge of migrating non-digital natives to the internet age.

In essence, all help content should be approached as though someone could be landing on it from anywhere. This opposes assuming they have moved sequentially through an architecture of your own design. It’s called a bottom-up approach to information architecture.

Mark’s book also explores the idea of using topic-based authoring as a way to structure your content. It’s a technique often used to cut costs because it means content is easily reusable, but Mark advocates its value beyond saving money.

He discusses how content consumption habits have changed. Users no longer go online, because we are always online.

Image source

User experience in docs

Every Page is Page One is closely related to the fields of User Experience and Search Engine Optimisation.

The concept may be more familiar to online marketers or UX designers, who are already well-versed in the art of linking pages together. It may be less familiar to traditional documentation writers.

As Mark says:

“People don’t arrive at your site, they arrive at your pages. Every Page is Page One.”

Another way of saying ‘Every Page is Page One’ is to say ‘every page is a landing page’. This is a great approach to take for knowledge bases in general, and important to bear in mind when considering the UX design for your site.

Not all topics are Every Page is Page One topics, because some are building blocks to be presented as part of a larger whole. These must be displayed to users with links between relevant content. A key definition of Every Page is Page One topics, however, is that each topic must stand alone.

Following Mark’s popular approach means pivoting your documentation strategy to view creation from the perspective of the user, rather than the company. It requires empathy, user interviews, analytics and testing.

A new way of learning

It’s preferable to think of your content as being structured like a cloud, rather than linearly.

With a book, an author and editorial team have decided which content is relevant to the reader. Using the web, the user can decide for his or herself which content is most useful to their learning and understanding.

Mark touches on the concept of learning ‘levels’, asserting that users must remain on the same level of complexity until they decide to ‘move up’. Interlinking provides the pathway between different levels.  

“[Links] perform specific functions in making a text perform effectively in a larger information set,” says Mark.

Links can be difficult to maintain in many content authoring tools, so it’s important to choose software for your knowledge base that offers the capability to easily update links.

He makes the point that content can only be pitched at ‘qualified’ readers, which means those who have the sufficient level of knowledge and skill to find your documentation useful. Context must be provided so readers can decide for themselves if they are qualified or not. Any attempt to provide too much context in your documentation results in a decline in usability.

Providing a documentation experience

This fascinating article by Iridize’s Noa Dror touches on how we should be aiming to create an ‘experience’ with our documentation, rather than simply writing our docs.

Noa says:

“We are no longer simply writing the support documentation – we are designing the support experience.”

This relates to the wider trend that more and more business functions are realising that they fall under the umbrella of UX. For example, customer support teams now increasingly understand that they cannot really be separated from the UX of a website or product.

Customers themselves make no distinction between internal company teams. They just expect to receive a product, and appropriate product support. And they don’t necessarily want to contact a human to receive it.

As David Ryan, cofounder of documentation software company Corilla says, “Customer support without documentation is just an expensive chat.”

Every Page is Page One documentation shows how online and real-world business operations must be tied together to create a holistic experience for the customer.

The pre-internet age

For everyone born after 1990 or so, it’s very hard to remember a world before the internet. You may not even have been alive to experience such a harsh, unbearable reality.

Only kidding. But for people who lived through the days of recording songs off the radio with cassette tapes, watching videos on their VCR player, or using floppy disks to save their data, it’s not necessarily a given that every life question should lead you straight to Google.

Image source

People used to look things up in library books, buy products in physical stores, or order through the mail. Information wasn’t interconnected in the way it is now, and there was no such thing as a search engine, or ‘CTRL + F’.

Printed books were the primary way that people consumed information, and these were written in a linear fashion with a top-down structure. Readers began with a title, and turned to the table of contents to see what information the book contained, and in what order it was presented.

This is no more in the internet and digital age.

Final remarks

Structuring your content in this way will be a very new idea for some people, but it’s the way forward in a world that’s nearly always online.

Now, 77% of America’s population has a smart phone. We are already seeing the rise of Smart Homes and the associated Internet of Things. Soon, we may be moving away from the concept of ‘pages’ altogether, although not yet.

Mark’s Every Page is Page One is a particularly useful approach to documentation because it recognises how changing user habits are affecting the way that companies provide customer support. It resists resting on incorrect assumptions that we know how users are finding and consuming content.

In an ideal world, all documentation writers will have full sovereignty over how they structure their content. In reality, writers will sometimes be championing the user against the requirements of many other internal teams. The challenge will be in educating diverse teams in the way of Every Page is Page One documentation.

KnowledgeOwl provides knowledge base software to help you achieve your aims with your support documentation. Take us for a free spin today. 

Main image by Aaron Burden on Unsplash