Cloud example

The latest version of the Workspace Web Edition Help serves as a good model for Cloud-based doc.

Why revise?

Customer issues

• Unnecessary complexity
• Lack of “why”—what’s the significance of feature x?
• Difficulty finding answers to specific questions/issues
• Jargon—“We’re not in the telephony business!” said one of the customers

Single-sourcing

• Within product doc (links rather than repetition of big chunks of text)
• Between Premise and Cloud products (reduce maintenance)

Industry standards

• Genesys is now in a different industry (enterprise, not telecom only)
• Customers expect greater usability

What we did

• Simplified (what does the user really need to know?)
• Cut word count by 60%, topic count by >50%
• Let the UI do what it does well
• Helped users through the rough spots
• Separated audience info
• Emphasized multimedia

Structure

• Fewer words and topics in the TOC mean that the doc is easier to scan
• Short H1s, move the questions to H2s

Content

• Less is more: easier to search and scan
• Less is cheaper: we now have to deal with translation costs
• Less is clearer: readers just want to get their work done; cut everything else
• Tell them once (and then link to it)
• Ripple: connect new features to other features and to the product as a whole