How We’re Reorganizing 216 Articles in Our Help Center

Nobody wants to hear they’re outdated… stale… or old. That’s exactly what we had to face, though. Throughout the days, months, and years, our Help Center, where we keep up to date articles about Buffer for our customers, had become just that.
Don’t get me wrong, there’s a ton of great content in there. That’s the problem, though. There’s just too much, and the content has started to become less and less reflective of Buffer: the product it is meant to support.

There are four of us on the team working on the Help Center, which is part of our larger 21-person Customer Advocacy team. We know we can’t just go in and edit each article as it stands. The change required is deeper than that. It requires us to rethink the entire structure, from our top categories, to how we merge and split articles, how we support our articles with visual content, and finally, how we present our article content in a clear and simplified way.

We’re right in the middle of the process to fully overhaul (or, “revamp,” as we like to call it) the 216 articles in our Help Center. In this post, I’ll explain how we’re confronting this project to avoid what could otherwise feel like an overwhelming initiative.

Why we’re taking on this project

There are two main reasons we might seriously consider a project this big:

Our customers are no longer being served by our content, recognized by unsuccessful searches or direct feedback;
We don’t believe the experience in the Help Center has evolved with our product.

For this change, we‘ve seen a bit of both.

On the customer side

We discovered through our use of Algolia that some basic search terms didn’t lead customers to the right articles.

We also found that the integrity of our information lacked in some areas, with some instances of conflicting information. This was due to multiple articles crossing over the same topic, but when that information changed, only one or two of the instances were updated.

Lastly, customers told us that our content wasn’t hitting the mark. Simple as that.

Ouch.

On the product evolution side

If you’ve been a Buffer customer for a while, you might have noticed some changes over the years. We continually evolve our product to better meet our customers’ needs. However, while we furiously updated our Help Center content, its unchanging organization grew further away from what our product looked and felt like.

Related, with the intention to meet the needs of all customers, we neglected the majority use case. We stocked our articles full of every nuance and use case we could think of, leading to very strong, but overwhelming articles.

This was in direct opposition to what we strive for in our product: clean design and simplicity of use.