Overhauling Attentive’s help center experience

TECHNICAL WRITING

Problem

The largest help center pain point across colleagues and customers was its usability. Most users searched for Marketing and CS resources that didn’t live in the help center, and were unaware of the user guides that it did house.

How I addressed it

After consulting customer-facing teams, Product Marketing, and technical writers, I:

  • Outlined a new information architecture which centralized all of Attentive’s assets in one resource with company branding

  • Presented solutions to executives, which immediately gained buy-in, and updated them as the project evolved

  • Collaborated with Design to implement an intuitive information architecture with Attentive’s CSS

  • Streamlined release comms by establishing a new change log and early access help content

Before & after

Proposing & implementing SSO

Sensitive information was maintained in PDFs that CS teams shared with clients via email. To simplify this, I proposed moving these resources to the help center and protecting them with single sign-on (SSO).

This allowed customers to self-serve with resources that were unavailable to the public and reduced strain on customer-facing teams.

Spearheading a change log

In response to internal and customer pain points around locating release information, I worked with Design, Product Marketing, and Customer Success teams to launch a change log and establish release communication processes around it. 

This change log gained universal support and simplified release comms while enabling customers to self-serve.

New design & information architecture

After gathering user pain point information, I:

  • Explored solutions with Design & Eng within the Zendesk constraints. This involved evaluating templates, developing mockups with our CSS and info architecture, and presenting iterations to leadership

  • Led the implementation process, overseeing the migration of all content, and coordinating closely with the Design team to align custom fields, implement SSO, and conduct QA checks

  • Conducted a two-week internal testing period to gather feedback before officially launching the updated help center to all users

The impact:

With increased traffic, the help center became the go-to landing page for developer resources, Product Marketing’s best practice resources, and Instructional Design’s onboarding courses

Immediate adoption from 5,000 users

This included user-facing teams like CS and Product Marketing, technical teams, and businesses using Attentive

Recognition from the CEO

The CEO stated that the streamlined customer experiences and internal release processes, as well as widespread user adoption of the help center well positioned Attentive to scale its business

Lasting impact

This new design and info architecture remains in use today by Technical Writing, Marketing, CS, and Design teams, and is fully integrated in other resources