We have been developing our help authoring tool, ClickHelp, for quite some time now. It has been a long journey of learning to prioritize things, to listen to feedback and apply it.
Different workflows require different functionality, so we have been learning how to balance out our technical writing tool and make it more flexible.
Our goal has always been to create a universal solution that would work for our clients and that would really make their technical writing experience more enjoyable. With the idea in mind of people being able to realize their full potential and create awesome user manuals, we keep working hard on perfecting ClickHelp.
Not to sound arrogant, but we can safely say that our online solution for technical writers is the major key player on the market now.
In this blog post, we will be talking about what makes ClickHelp a great HAT and how it can enhance your unique technical writing process.
Flexibility
Just like we have mentioned before, we believe that every documentation team should have the possibility of integrating a help authoring tool into their existing work process. Building a new workflow around a tool is possible, however, it shouldn't be the only option available as not every team is ready for such groundbreaking changes.
ClickHelp is a highly customizable help writing solution that allows integrating all your favorite tools and services into the work process - Zendesk, Google Analytics, LiveChat, Salesforce SSO, and many more.
Technical writers don't like to talk about branding a lot, but it is something that needs to be dealt with anyway. In ClickHelp we tried to make branding as painless as possible - the ready-to-use templates, drag and drop fields, a powerful WYSIWYG editor, CSS style files will be there for you to help brand your online documentation portal and get this task out of the way quickly.
Flexibility of ClickHelp is also reflected in its teamwork features. A system of user roles and permissions existing in the tool works flawlessly and can be adapted to practically any workflow.
Single-Sourcing and Content Reuse
Do you know what's great about technical documentation? Mostly, its content gets repeated throughout the years. In some help topics, only the smallest details change like a tool version, a feature name…Fixing this manually would be truly a tedious task, but with the right online documentation tool at hand, that supports content reuse, maintaining your docs is a piece of cake!
Single-sourcing is one of the signature features of ClickHelp. You can create different outputs from one source using variables, conditional blocks, conditional TOC, content snippets, style files, etc. This allows dramatically decreasing the time needed for updating documentation.
Analytics
What people love about our software documentation tool a lot is that it gives you total control over the work process by providing numerous useful stats. Managing even big teams becomes easier when you have instant access to all the metrics you need.
You get a bird's eye view of documentation projects progress with the built-in statistics, or, you can choose to do quite the opposite and analyze the individual performance of the team members.
Another important aspect of metrics is that you can actually improve the reader experience. ClickHelp offers dozens of metrics including readability scores that evaluate your content based on different factors. For example, a readability score can say what level of education is sufficient to easily understand any given text. Thus, you can manipulate content to meet your target audience expectations based on a real linguistic analysis.
Review Process
Reviewing is an important step for content creation. And, ClickHelp fully supports it. Firstly, our tool has a special reviewer role and, secondly, ClickHelp allows setting up an effective review process thanks to its features like ToDo lists, customizable email notifications, Review comments.
As our clients are interested in this functionality, it gets regular updates. In fact, it got a major update in the latest product release - ClickHelp Aurora Polaris.
Custom Full-Text Search
Full-text search is key to better UX with technical documents. Of course, it needs to be supported by a smart navigation system of breadcrumbs, links, mini-TOCs, and, yet, full-text search on its own is a very important instrument for your readers to find out exactly what they are looking for.
ClickHelp has a unique patented full-text search, it ensures that any user receives only the most relevant results for their queries.
Context-Sensitive Help
Context help is a very efficient way of helping users. It is meant to be proactive to users needs. This approach constitutes one of the leading case deflection techniques.
The idea is simple - you just need to embed some abstracts from your technical documentation right into a product UI. This way, users get timely assistance without the necessity to open a manual.
In ClickHelp, code for context help gets generated instantly!
Conclusion
All the features we mentioned above support our main goal - help technical writers create great user manuals easily. We are striving to create the perfect help authoring environment, and we are pretty satisfied with how this is coming together so far.
Our future plans are to keep pushing the industry forward and help technical writing evolve further.
If you are not familiar with the ClickHelp content creation experience yet, you can get a free 30-day limitless trial and try everything we mentioned here today.
Good luck with your technical writing!
ClickHelp Team
Author, host and deliver documentation across platforms and devices