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A Guide to Better Tech Notes
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A Guide to Better Tech Notes
Publication date: July 2009
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Executive summary
Tech notes should be the heart and soul of a great Web support site.
Yet painfully often, users encounter a tangle of hard-to-understand,
poorly maintained knowledgebase documents that fail to solve their
problems—and may even discourage users from ever coming back to
the site. In fact, many knowledgebases were originally written for
internal use by support reps, not customers, and hardly anyone ever
seems to ask, “Is this approach really working for us on the Web?”
When support managers do take a hard look at their knowledgebases, they
often spot deep problems. The growing popularity of the
Knowledge-Centered Support (KCS) methodology, for instance, suggests that
many companies are willing to undergo a virtual knowledgebase brain
transplant to find a better way to deliver support knowledge. There’s also
widespread recognition that many users learn better from illustrations and
videos than from traditional text instructions. Community forums are
rapidly creating huge repositories of loosely-organized knowledge outside
the structure of a company’s own knowledgebase. And perhaps most important,
the traditional “break-fix” focus of tech support content no longer seems
adequate in a Web-dominated world; in fact, traffic metrics and feedback
from customers often suggest that users place far higher value on how to
succeed with a technology product than how to deal with an occasional
technical glitch.
In short, the world of support knowledge is changing—sometimes in
profound ways, sometimes in much more modest fashion.
What are real-world support managers doing these days to respond to new
trends in knowledge delivery? To explore this question, we invited ASP
members and friends to share their thoughts on creating “better tech
notes”—a deliberately open-ended request to encourage
outside-the-box thinking.
Here are the topics they discussed:
- Tech Note Templates
- Finding an Appropriate Writing Style
- Streamlining the Editing Process
- Building an FAQ
- Search Strategies
- Metrics & Incentives
Copies of the survey are free to ASP members in the
members-only area.
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