Quick summary: This is the second part of a three-part article on improving the quality of online help.
In part 1 we addressed the need for making help highly visible to users, and touched upon how to present it site-wide and in context. Now let’s look at ways you can be sure you’re addressing the most important questions and issues.
3. Address common questions
In principle this is also a straightforward idea; help sections should address the issues users are most likely to encounter and the questions they’re most likely to ask. But how do you know which questions to address? There are numerous sources that can inform your help content and FAQs:
- User testing. As you might guess I’m a strong advocate for testing with representative users. I don’t know any better way to learn what questions people have while using your website or application than to sit some down and ask them. But there are other forms of user feedback that can also provide insights (see below).
- Customer service emails. If you make it easy for users to send customer service comments and complaints, these messages can guide your help topics and ensure that the biggest pain points are addressed.
- Analytics. If users tend to abandon your website on a particular page or at a certain step in a process you may be able to make some educated guesses about the issues they’re struggling with. Log analysis can give you some good starting points but it’s complementary to real user feedback, not a replacement for it.
- Search data. If you have a search application or search appliance like Google Mini you can generate reports that indicate exactly what terms your users search for. Often these reports provide useful insights; for example if users are searching for phrases like “return policy” or “website security” it may mean these questions aren’t adequately addressed in the website messaging and/or help content. If users tend to search more than once for the same thing – but using different search terms – then you may also have a problem with your terminology (this will be a topic for another article).
- Call center logs. Larger companies that have a call centers generally track the reasons customers call. These data represent a wealth of information and can help determine which areas of help can be improved. For example if customers often call to ask about how to change their password then it may be that the option is difficult to find. On the other hand if the option to change a password is presented prominently but customers call because they can’t understand the process, then the quality of the help content may need to be improved. And speaking of that…
Next up: copy writing and feedback loops
In part 3 of this series we’ll examine the need for clear and concise help copy, and we’ll address the important (but often overlooked) need for enabling users to rate just how well your help is working.
Photo credit: romulusnr. Creative Commons licensed.
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