What is help authoring?
Help authoring refers to the process of designing, publishing, and maintaining software help documentation. The resulting text is used in explanation guides, FAQs, manuals, and help files.
Despite being performed by specialized technical writers, help authoring is often considered a development process. Development teams employ help authoring to create and maintain help documentation for their existing software products and any new features that might be added. The primary software tools used for this process are help authoring tools (HAT) and knowledge base software. HATs assist technical writers by reducing the time and effort needed when creating assistance materials for both employees and end users. Knowledge base software allows technical writers to maintain and update a central knowledge base containing all software help text they created about their product. This knowledge base, which is often a user-accessible web page or document, can be updated as soon as technical writers add new text or images.
Types of help authoring
Depending on what help authoring is being used for or the industry a company is in, one or more types of help authoring will be utilized.
- FAQ writing: FAQ (frequently asked questions) sections are important customer resources that help them resolve common software issues. This helps companies mitigate the amount of traffic coming through their customer service channels.
- Tutorial writing: Tutorials and explanation guides are written to soften the learning curve for new software users. This kind of writing is perhaps the most quintessential example of the crossover between software development and technical writing that help authoring represents. Tutorials must be clear and concise, and they must also be presented clearly as a user navigates a company’s app for the first time.
- Employee-facing documents: Beyond customer-facing help materials, companies also employ help authoring to create internal documentation. Employees might use this documentation as a training resource, a reference point, or both.
Benefits of using help authoring
- Traffic filtering: Help authoring allows companies to provide their customers with clear, easily accessible help documentation. This increases the odds that a user experiencing a problem can troubleshoot it themselves without having to enter the customer service queue.
- Knowledge management: Help authoring for internal use ensures that employees have access to as much relevant information as possible. This allows employees to do their best work and prevents information from being siloed.
- Customer onboarding: Help authoring helps companies guide their new users through their software’s features and usage. This promotes a positive onboarding experience for new customers.
- Customer retention: By employing help authoring to provide customers with troubleshooting resources, companies retain more customers who might otherwise have stopped service out of frustration.
Help authoring best practices
Help authoring must be performed with thoroughness, clarity, and tone in mind. For help documentation of any kind to be effective, readers should be able to find help for common questions and issues and grasp the content easily. The tone should either be straightforward and informative or match a company’s desired brand identity.
To make help authoring work, users can follow these best practices:
- Address common questions and issues: When writing help documentation, writers should address as many common questions and issues as possible. This makes it more likely for users to find what they need via the documentation and prevents frustration.
- Write clearly: When employing help authoring, the final product should be as clear as possible and organized in such a way that users can navigate to their desired topic easily.
- Use software tools: HATs and knowledge base software can help companies organize and manage their help documentation. Other benefits include scalability and reduced time spent writing.
Help authoring vs. knowledge management
Help authoring is closely related to knowledge management. In fact, many HATs possess knowledge base management capabilities. To distinguish between the two concepts, it’s best to think of help authoring as the actual creation of FAQs, manuals, help files, and other documentation to store useful information. In contrast, knowledge management is an integrated approach to identifying, capturing, retrieving, and sharing these information assets.
Adam Crivello
Adam is a research analyst focused on dev software. He started at G2 in July 2019 and leverages his background in comedy writing and coding to provide engaging, informative research content while building his software expertise. In his free time he enjoys cooking, playing video games, writing and performing comedy, and avoiding sports talk.
