A user guide is an online technical document that guides customers through a product's features, functionality, use cases, and much more. It has step-by-step instructions explained using a rich combination of written text and powerful visuals that help customers understand a product to the core and solve technical issues on their own without expert assistance. Such guides can be created for different kinds of products, including hardware, software, and even electronic goods.
Creating a user guide is a good investment that pays off well in the long term. Here are some of the attention-grabbing benefits user guides can bring to your business:
Support tickets are bound to increase if customers find it difficult to understand and use your product. A user guide can help you here. It works as an easy reference guide for customers, helping them at every step as they navigate through your product’s features and functionalities. When customers start figuring out solutions on their own, they are less likely to raise tickets.
A user guide is equally helpful for your agents, as it is for your customers. As a well-structured and searchable document, it helps agents find answers to questions quickly every time they are responding to a customer request over call or email. With information at their fingertips, agents are better prepared to handle customer problems while keeping the resolution time to a minimum.
Finding your contact details hidden in some corner of the website, making a call, and then waiting for a response - this entire process can be extremely frustrating. With an easy-to-follow user guide, customers have a steady information resource to refer to every time they encounter a problem. Instant help, 24x7 self-service support, and the peace of mind that follows make customers love your product even more.
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Creating a user guide is incredibly easy with a dedicated user guide template. It provides you with a starting point, so you don’t have to spend time thinking about where to begin. This free user guide template is carefully designed by some of our best minds and contains all the necessary elements to help you kick-start the content creation process. For example, it comes with a pre-designed structure, a table of contents, and topic-related sections and subsections. It also has a dedicated space for your brand name and logo. Get this fully-customizable online user guide template and set up a compelling user guide in just a few minutes.
Customers expect a user guide to supply them with useful information that they can use to make the most of your product. Follow these five steps and build a user guide that fulfills your customers’ expectations.
A user guide can help customers only when it provides what they really need. Before you start with the writing process, learn everything about your customers. What are their pain points? What kind of problems do they frequently face? How much technical knowledge do they have? Grasp these details and establish a strong approach that directs the entire writing process.
When you learn about your customers, you will gain a good idea of the problems they encounter. This serves as the basis of the topics you can add to the user guide. Often, the problems will be related to product installation, safety, and maintenance. Use these problems to create relevant topics and sub-topics for your user guide.
Before your team starts working on these topics, determine a structure for your user guide. Ensure that each topic covers a specific subject and solves a particular problem. Keep the structure to the point by using a user guide template and create a table of contents to help customers navigate the content effortlessly.
Even a slight mistake in the facts presented or language used can ruin the user experience. Editors and experts should carefully review everything that goes into the user guide. This can be done by setting workflow status for all articles and passing them through multiple review stages.
It’s important to keep the content on-point, and relevant to customer needs to achieve ultimate product success. Modern tools like ProProfs Knowledge Base offer AI-powered reports that bring the top and worst-performing articles to your notice. This helps you make necessary improvements to your user guide.
This user guide template is a no-brainer. It lets you create an awesome user guide without writing a single line of code. It has a pre-built structure and pre-written topics, so all you gotta do is focus on creating quality content for your customers. Just start adding content to the categories provided, add images and videos, and get your user guide ready in minutes. What makes this user guide template even more terrific is that it is fully customizable and works great across devices.
The ultimate goal of a user guide is to be well understood by its product users. While it teaches customers about your product, it also educates them on how to use it optimally. But, as a creator of the user guide, how do you ensure that customers absorb everything you write? By creating a systematic user guide that focuses both on the product and its end users. Here are five actionable best practices you can follow for some amazing results.
For a user guide to be easy to follow, it should be simple and descriptive. The language should be free of jargon. Even if you use jargon, it should be explained then and there. Clearly describe the product and its features and leave no room for confusion. Clarity and specificity are the two building blocks of a good user guide so ensure that the information you provide is crystal-clear and to the point.
A user guide doesn’t have to be a text-heavy document that customers find challenging to read and understand. Adding the right visuals at the right places is a sure-fire way to help customers grasp all information and make optimal use of your product. Every time you describe a feature or explain a process, add relevant diagrams, flow charts, and videos to help customers stay on the right track.
A black and white manual with no splash of color and a colorful manual that’s too difficult to focus on - these are design blunders you should avoid. Instead, keep the design minimal yet impactful. Use subtle colors, topic-relevant themes, and fonts that are easy to read. In addition to this, ensure that there is some breathing space for readers to read and digest the content.
Grammatical mistakes, spelling errors, or even punctuation flaws can change the meaning of an entire sentence. It also puts a question on the credibility of the information you provide. As a technical document that customers rely on, a user guide should be free of such mistakes. Regular proofreading will help you check the information’s accuracy, spot typographical errors, and fix them on time.
It is easy to intimidate customers by presenting the information they can’t make heads and tails of. That’s not going to bring you any good. A logical topic hierarchy and flow are required to take customers step by step, from simple concepts to more advanced ones. This will help them learn about the product from scratch and seamlessly move on to the complex features and use cases.
