Great Knowledge Base Design Cycle

Having trouble getting started with your knowledge base? Try the Great Knowledge Base Design Cycle to help provide guidelines and reminders as you work on your documentation and self-service system.

The cycle has six stages: need, outline, write, publish, report, and act. The idea is that your knowledge base should be a constantly improving tool for your customers to quickly and easily find answers to their questions and problems. The cycle provides a framework for you to quickly create and iterate on your documentation in order to best serve the needs of your customers.

1. Need: What is the purpose of your knowledge base?

Let’s face it: if you are doing business online, you probably need some sort of knowledge base or FAQ. If you aren’t sure you need a knowledge, maybe you should check out these 10 sexy statistics that show how important self-service support is for your business.

Target Audience and Documentation Objectives
You first need to ask yourself who your target audience is. Is this an internal knowledge base for your employees to quickly and easily find and store information, or is this for your customers to use to help quickly answer their questions? For many knowledge bases, it’s both. A well-built knowledge base for your customers easily becomes a popular internal tool for your staff.

So your goal is to help your target audience quickly and accurately answer their own questions.

You also need to define what information you are trying to document. For many companies, it is the simple “how do I” questions that come up repetitively through your customer service channels. Other organizations might also want to include trouble-shooting guides and FAQs.

Your documentation objectives (the types of articles you will be writing) will support your goal. If your goal is to reduce “how do I” support requests, these might be your only documentation objective. If you want to reduce problem or bug tickets, you might want to document trouble-shooting guides and workarounds to known issues. If you want to help increase sales, you might want to include the FAQ content that your marketing and sales team uses on the website.

Brainstorm
Once you understand your target audience and documentation objectives, brainstorming a list of topics is a helpful way to front-load your knowledge base with good content. Who should you include in your brainstorm? Try to get as many customer-facing opinions as possible; your front-line staff talks to customers everyday and will have valuable insight into what questions or problems frequently come up. Remember, there is no judgement in brainstorming – you just want to get as many ideas out there as possible!

Selection and Refinement
Once you finish brainstorming, it’s time to select and refine which topics you want and need to cover to get your knowledge base out there. This is where the targeted audience and documentation objectives come in handy. You can narrow down the list to include just the topics that support your overall goal and objectives.

How many topics should you include? That’s a great question and, unfortunately, the answer is that it depends. But really, if you can pinpoint the 5-10 most common questions or problems from your brainstorm that serve your audience and documentation objective, start with that! Remember – this is a continuous cycle and you will be iterating on your knowledge base. Save those unused ideas for later!

2. Outline: What are you going to cover?

Once you have a list of topics you want to cover, it’s time to organize them into an outline as well as outline the content for each article. This step is often skipped in many projects, but it is a valuable tool to stay focused and simplify the writing process.

Organize
If you are only going with 5 topics, you can probably have just one category in your knowledge base for now. The more articles you have, the more you need to think about how best to organize them for the ease of use of your audience.

If you have more than one documentation objective (like “how do I” and trouble-shooting), you could break it up by category. Or you might want to group both “how do I” and troubleshooting articles about the same topic together.

There is no best way. What’s important is putting thought into it and doing what’s best for the customer.

Refine Topics
Here’s where you need to think about your audience and make sure that you are creating content that speaks to them in their language. Article titles need to be clear and written in the same way that your audience would search for a topic.

Think about how you want to structure your articles. Will they be short answers? Bulleted lists? Screenshots? The longer the articles, the greater the likelihood they won’t be read. Be mindful of phrasing and language use; unclear language, grammar, and ambiguity can all cause problems for your readers. And lastly, remember that language can be different between demographic groups.

Outline your articles
Create a simple outline for each article. When it doubt, remember the K.I.S.S. principle – keep it simple stupid.

Fight lack of focus by keeping articles short and covering one topic at a time. Stick to your organization. Break long articles with multiple sections up into sub-articles for people to find faster.

Fight reader fatigue with shorter articles, clear images, readable fonts, titles, and scannable text. Use headers, bulleted lists, and numbered steps when possible.

Fight miscommunication by paying attention to language. Define technical terms and use the audience’s language. Have a peer review for clarity. Speak in your company’s and products voice (use the same terms).

Reestablish Focus
Once you get into organizing topics and working on your topic titles, you can get side-tracked from your original goals and objectives. Make sure to stay on track and keep in mind that your goal is to help your audience find answers to their questions or problems.

3. Write articles: Fill in those outlines!

This is where the majority of time is spent working on (and procrastinating working on) knowledge base articles.

During this phase, you want to…

• Write articles
• Preview
• Proofread
• Get feedback/peer review
• Add value (screenshots, links to relevant content, definitions, etc)

4. Publish: Get your articles in front of your target audience!

Once you publish your articles, you want to ensure your customers can access them easily. Make sure that they are displaying correctly in your knowledge base and that they are coming up when searching for the content.

You can also choose to embed the link to the articles inside your application or site on relevant pages. Plus, if you are using a tool like HelpGizmo that provides contextual help, you can choose what pages you want to display your articles to your intended audience.

Many people also choose to share new articles in company newsletters as well in release notes and through social media. Knowledge base articles can also function as marketing pieces, so get them out there!

5. Report: Measure your articles success with tracking metrics and feedback

How will you know if your knowledge base is meeting its goal of answering questions quickly and easily for your intended audience? You need data, of course!

Using tools like Google Analytics, you can track how each one of your knowledge base articles is doing and how many people they are helping. Many help tools will also include view tracking for individual articles as well as individual article feedback. Who better than the customers to let you know if your article was helpful or not?

With HelpGizmo, you can track how many support requests are resolved using the knowledge base. We track behavior to see how many support requests are still submitted when trying to provide immediate answers from your knowledge base. Additionally, we track which pages of your website or application are causing the most searches and the most support requests.

6. Act: Iterate on your knowledge base!

Here’s the most important part of the Great Knowledge Base Design Cycle: act on the data and feedback you collect! Use the customer feedback on individual articles to make them better or add new articles. Use the tracking and view data to keep the most frequently viewed articles updated, and consider deleting or revising content that isn’t getting used.

Most important, use your support request data to figure out what questions or issues are still not being addressed through your knowledge base. Here’s where the cycle begins again: use the data you are collect to provide fresh and new content for your audience based on their actual feedback, requests, and behavior.

A Great Knowledge Base Design Cycle can take the guess work out of documentation and break a large project into manageable steps. We hope this helps you create an amazing knowledge base for your intended audience, whoever they may be!