Easy Navigation and
Full-Text Search

Producing detailed and thorough documentation is very important. But what if your client wants to find something on a specific subject, and all you have is a 358-page long Word or PDF document? They search for a term, get thousands of matches, or no exact matches at all, close the document and contact support. Or even drop your product altogether because they assume the feature they need is not there.

To help your readers navigate through documentation effortlessly, ClickHelp offers a number of features.

Patented Full-Text Search Engine

ClickHelp offers a full-text search engine customized for documentation search. You can search the entire documentation portal or just a specific set of user guides. It handles word forms and tenses to allow your readers use natural language, considers term proximity and dozens of other factors when ranking results.

For complex use cases, you can use special operators (like quotes, wildcards, etc.) in search queries. If you create password-protected documentation, the search engine will consider user permissions when displaying the search results - restricted documents will not be there for those who don't have the access.

Context Help

Context-sensitive help, or just "context help", is a type of user documentation, which is smart enough to deliver the right content at the right moment.

Context help makes it easier to understand complex features without switching to a different screen. Users can see helpful tips as small popups or embedded tutorial panels right in your UI.

Check the demo below to see specific Context Help types supported by ClickHelp.

See Live Demo

Taxonomies

To further improve search results, you can use taxonomies (index keywords) to make topics searchable by terms that are not directly in their content. For example, if there’s a topic about SSL encryption in your documentation, you can assign the “security” index keyword to it, and even if the topic doesn’t contain a single mention of “security” or any derivatives, it will still be searchable by that term.

Our search page can filter results by publications and aggregate links to a single topic found in multiple versions of a user guide to avoid duplicating search result in case of multi-version user manuals.

Automatic Navigation Elements

Next/Previous Links

These automatic hierarchy navigation elements will help you create easy cross-topic navigation or build step-by-step tutotials. No matter how you change the TOC structure, these links will point to the correct topic of your documentation.

Breadcrumbs

Breadcrumbs can also be used in the user guides you create with ClickHelp. Sometimes they can even replace the Table of Contents. You can hide the TOC through portal branding options and leave only the breadcrumbs to change the reader experience.

Mini-TOC

This element renders a list of topic sections based on the headings you define. This is very useful for longer topics with multiple sections, like API documentation or complex multi-step instructions. For example, the mini-TOC element can be a part of the floating right-hand navigation, so it's always visible on the screen.

Companies often have a number of documents for their clients: API Documentation, User Guides, Knowledge Bases, FAQs. ClickHelp gives you a way to unite all these documents in a single online portal with strong search, navigation and your unique style. It’s more than a publishing platform - your team will work together while creating and maintaining technical documents.

This way, ClickHelp becomes the central information hub for your company clients, partners and employees.

Accessibility

As technology is around us, all people refer to documentation very often. That’s why it’s crucial to make help authoring tools accessible, as well as documentation itself. So, technical writers and readers with disabilities can use a tool and read the content. We clearly understand how important accessibility is in technical writing. That’s why the Reader UI in our help authoring tool is compliant with the most modern accessibility guidelines - Section 508 and WCAG 2.0 Level AA requirements. Thanks to all customization possibilities of our online documentation tool, it’s now easier to create effective and accessible documentation for readers. If you want to learn more, visit the ClickHelp Accessibility page.

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Single-Sourcing and Content Reuse

ClickHelp allows you to spend less time on routine tasks and more on creating the content. Conditional content, snippets and variables for unprecedented ease of writing.

Easy Navigation and Full-Text Search