Our team has got so many reasons to be excited. The main reason is, of course, the ClickHelp Aurora Polaris release. One of the nicest feelings is when your hard work pays out and this is exactly the case - Digital Journal added ClickHelp to the list of major key players!
Becoming Major Key Player
We don't mean to boast here (well, maybe just a little), we just want to share our story with you. ClickHelp started out as a cloud-based technical writing tool in 2010. At that time, there were hardly any companies that developed online HATs. So, our team was among the few people out there who started this trend.
We talked with technical writers and realized what functionality was missing - single sourcing! ClickHelp was based around the idea that you can spend way less time and effort on creating different versions of your docs.
As time passed, new features were added. We worked side by side with our clients listening to their feedback and implementing features they asked for. And we won't stop there, because times, technology and people change, and developing a tool is a never-ending process, really.
Over the years, ClickHelp turned into a very powerful tool that can fit into virtually any technical writing workflow; and our latest update made it even more flexible. We are extremely proud of the teamwork functionality improvements, like a brand new review process. Single-sourcing is still very strong in ClickHelp, but we are trying to expand the toolset available for our clients. For example, the Aurora Polaris update includes 30+ metrics to evaluate content quality, analyze team performance; we improved the full-text search, made navigation options even wider; new reporting features became available…
And, now, we are seeing so much pay off, it is amazing! Becoming a major key player is very flattering, but what we value even more is your feedback, so keep it coming!
Backstage: How we Develop Releases
We all know that new product versions can bring either satisfaction or disappointment. Changes can be too radical when you open the app and it feels like you need to learn it all over again, or, on the contrary - nothing seems to really have changed except for the version number.
When a company releases a new version, it wants to show to its clients that the product is being developed and improved. A lot of companies have busy update schedules, so busy, in fact, that the focus is mostly placed on minor fixes and improvements. It is the common agility pitfall - you need to put out updates faster and more frequently while their quality often suffers.
At ClickHelp, we take updates seriously. We analyze a lot of information (customer feedback, industry trends, etc.) to create lists of features and fixes that may be included in the next update. Then, we see how it fits into the concept of our tool’s development.
In our opinion, each new release should bring something solid - major changes and improvements intertwined with smaller usability and design tweaks. This is how it is done in our company.
Conclusion
It is an honor for us to become a key player on the market of help authoring tools. An honor and big responsibility, too. We will keep working closely with our clients to determine the direction of our future development, as we now clearly see that helping others succeed is really what it takes to become a major key player.
Good luck with your technical writing!
ClickHelp Team
Author, host and deliver documentation across platforms and devices