Solutions

October 14, 2023

How to create a user help system for B-end products

The user help system can improve user experience, help users use product correctly, and experience various functions of product. B-end products usually require high training costs due to their specific business attributes and complexity. These costs are reflected not only in knowledge of complex business concepts and processes, but also in costs of interaction of entire system.

The ultimate goal of B-end products is to meet daily needs of users in managing work; A good B-end product should first of all be an easy-to-use management tool, and its ultimate goal is to improve work efficiency, reduce management costs, and ensure data security. Here user system plays an extremely important role, it is implementation of organizational structure and authority management in user system that guarantees management of personnel, business processes and data security of application system. Within B-end user system, different user systems need to be developed for different products to reflect different user groups targeted by each product.

Help system for end users of product B

The user help system of B-end products is mainly divided into active, passive and automatic help.

Proactive help

The main goal of active help is to enable users to become familiar with product as soon as possible, including technical terms related to business system, feature introduction, workflow, business information flow, etc. As system interacts with user, system guesses user intention through active assistance. There are generally two types of scripts that display active help:

  1. Users contact system, get to know system, and attempt to use a particular functional step in system. These situations are mainly focused on novice users in narrow sense.
  2. When existing users encounter new features and interfaces (repeating product features or interfaces), this situation is for all novice users in a broad sense.
passive help

The main purpose of developing passive help is to enable system to quickly respond to user problems, including three groups for novice users, intermediate users, and advanced users. There are currently three main solutions for this type of help: Help Center/Help Documentation, Customer Service, and Global Living Features.

Automatic help

The main goal of automatic assistance is to improve resiliency of system by using some automated processing techniques and to minimize burden on users when making decisions. When system is enoughis smart (or developer behind it is well-rounded enough) to predict user's expectations, it can actively make suggestions and help user, and even help user perform some tasks automatically. How to create a user help system for B-end products

How to create a help system for B-end users

The editor helps B-side developers create a business system suitable for their own purposes by sorting out current B-side system that is widely used and has formed a specific user view to help guide design practice. Help user system.

style

Write from a formal product point of view to help users, describe same things or same action vocabulary to maintain unity while maintaining content integrity, use concise language to avoid incomplete content. Understand user's background, use appropriate professional, concise and precise words to effectively convey information and improve efficiency of user understanding.

structure

The importance of layout and layout for a help center is obvious. As for product, we should quickly understand overall structure of product for users, instead of listing all features of product and explaining them one by one. I believe that a qualified online reference document should include following three parts:

  • Product update dynamics: Inform users in advance of latest product update features, inform users of new features, and let them know that product has been updated and iterated.
  • Systematic introduction to product: For new users, you can create a dedicated topic to quickly learn product, and for old users, give a clear idea of ​​the function of product as a whole.
  • Knowledge base on key issues: frequently asked questions from users (available from customer support), tips on using product, or explanations of difficulties with product.
  • function
  • Search function. As a collection of content, online help documents are not sufficient to classify content. An accurate and efficient search function needs to be added. Thus, on one hand, problem of human inertia is solved, and on other hand, efficiency of users' work is increased. In my opinion structured content is for beginners because they don't know what questions to look for.
  • Article guide. Each article in reference document does not exist in isolation. When a single product feature is presented to users, it will have one or more features associated with it. Using content association form can not only help users understand product more deeply, but also make content of a single article less voluminous.
  • An easy to use help center/tool ​​for manually creating B-end products.

    This is an online tool for editing documents and sharing content. It not only provides users with an easy-to-use knowledge sorting platform, but also provides a high-quality platformto publish knowledge. The content of document will be automatically converted to website using setup. URL links can be accessed, which is convenient for customers to browse web, help them understand product, and provide a convenient experience for users. This will help creator plan ahead for display structure of help page. Users only need to edit content as needed, and content can be previewed right in view to avoid unnecessary errors. Even beginners can create a beautiful and practical help center and product manual page. How to create a user help system for B-end products
A good help center/manual creation tool should be easy to use for internal employees and convenient for external clients (external help center looks good). In terms of product benefits, I have summarized following 4 points.

  • In terms of operation: there is no need to build a document frame in operation (each theme has a corresponding display frame, and now there are 15 themes for help document scene), it can be used by opening a browser, and you do not know programming and design. If you know how to use Word, you can easily edit documents, edit, update and publish at any time. Maintenance costs are low and customers can view them easily with one click.
  • External display: various external display themes to support adapt to mobile phone, you can switch and change colors at will, support adding page footers and independent domain names...
  • Details: Contains many useful plugins, including global search, user feedback, article guide, help site statistics, site navigation...
  • Editor: rich rich text + Markdown make editing easier (supports uploading videos, images and files)
  • Address: https://www.baklib.com/?utm_content=7&utm_source=zhihu