Product Documentation: Guide,Types, Benefits & Best Practices

Product documentation is crucial to a uniform understanding, whether you’re onboarding new users or assisting internal teams with operational efficiency. In the modern world, where everything runs on technology, having a well-organised and easy-to-follow documentation structure is a prerequisite, not an additional feature. Proper documentation minimises support inquiries, increases customer satisfaction, and enables other internal customers to make decisions without delay.

A Zendesk study found that 67% of customers prefer self-service over speaking to a company representative. Additionally, 81% of customers attempt to resolve issues themselves before contacting a service representative. This indicates how increasing self-service capabilities through documentation can be a wise investment in one’s product experience strategy.

What Does Product Documentation Mean?

Product documentation is a broad expression for every document explaining the product’s functionality, features, architecture, and even use processes. It is a complete user handbook for clients, developers, stakeholders, and internal personnel.

What Are the Main Types of Product Documentation?

1. Internal Documentation: Includes technical descriptions, API documents, and other development artifacts for engineers.
2. External Documentation: Includes guides such as user guides or manuals, frequently asked questions (FAQs), and how-to articles that customers can utilise to improve the product.

Documentation has a single aim: to provide information to users in a straightforward and simplified way so that users can easily understand and utilise the content without complex processes.

What Are the Common Types of Product Documentation?

All product documentation types have a particular purpose for specific users. The most common ones include:

• User Manuals: They contain instructions that enable customers to use the product.

• API Documentation: Developed for the specific audience of your product’s APIs. It explains how the developers can work with your product and includes information about the endpoints, parameters, example requests, etc.

• FAQs and Troubleshooting Guides: Answer the most urgent questions to help reduce the number of support ticket appeals submitted.

• Release Notes: Provide users with information about the new features, bug fixes, and improvements to keep them up to date.

• Product Requirements Documents: Internal documents that list what the product will do to ensure alignment among all the teams involved, well before the first stage of development is started.

• Installation and Setup Guides: These guides explain the steps for users who want to set up the software or perform the integration.

• Knowledge Base Articles: Contains all the educational content along with the tutorial of the product.

What Are the Key Advantages of Clear Product Documentation?

An organised product documentation process will provide you with an asset in terms of support, but having clear, structured documentation will put your strategy ahead. Here’s why:

• Fosters Customer Self-service: Customers appreciate being able to help themselves, which reflects their improved product satisfaction and loyalty.

• Accelerates Customer Onboarding: Useful documentation helps onboard new team members and customers by making learning quicker and smoother.

• Increases Collaboration Across Departments: All teams, from development to design, marketing to support, work more efficiently with well-documented processes.

• Assists in Scaling: Documentation helps maintain consistency and minimises the need for repetitive training as products increase alongside the number of users.

• Improves SEO Ranking: Externally available documents like help centers may bolster the site’s visibility on search engines and enhance organic traffic.

How Does Documentation Empower Internal Teams?

While documentation guides the end users’ product, it equally serves your internal teams, which need well-maintained, clear instructions compiled within a single repository. This aids departments with training and collaborative decision-making while acting as the intelligent workforce.

Here’s how different teams are supported:

1. Support Teams: Support representatives do not need to bug product managers or answer customer queries relying on outdated, undocumented knowledge. They can consult precise documentation in step-by-step formats, enabling them to refer to detailed documentation.
2. Product and Engineering: Developers who eliminate the miscommunication gap, obstruction, and delays during the development cycle can consult extensive documentation undergoing integration on features served through APIs and other integrations.
3. Marketing and Sales: These members, who may need early access to detailed physical or digital product descriptions for pre-purchase marketing, can devise campaigns and effectively pitch the product to high-value clients anticipating new launches.
4. Onboarding and Training: Newly recruited personnel are onboarded more efficiently through structured guidance when given up-to-date documents outlining workflows.

What Steps Create an Effective Documentation Process?

Well-structured product documentation isn’t just about incorporating the how-to guides. It takes precise planning with the user or your audience. Here’s how to make sure that every step is useful:

Step 1: Identify the Purpose and Audience

Define who will use the document—end users, support staff, or developers—and what they need to do with it. Try to understand their obtainable goals or targets. This approach allows you to determine how to set the style, shape, and granularity of information.

Step 2: Develop an Outline

Formulate getting-started guides alongside the introduction, feature highlights, and triage tips. Think classically and try to map out precise grammar in your documentation. A standard order can contain an introduction, a getting-started guide, feature breakdowns, troubleshooting guides, and FAQs.

Step 3: Compile Information

Collect as much cross-organisational information as possible to assemble and collate clinical details, support cases, and examples alongside product managers, engineers, and the support teams. This will avoid creating trust issues, increasing confusion, or inaccuracies.

Step 4: Use Appropriate Language

Set a universal lexicon to be used throughout. Deflect jargon and maintain a uniform tone. Structure unscannable fragments by creating headers, bulleted lists, and visual aids.

Step 5: Select the Correct Tools and Formats

This step will require you to make a decision. Do you want guides aimed at customers or documentation intended for internal workers? Choose document editing, version control, and collaborative supporting software such as Confluence, Notion, or GitBook.

Step 6: Review, Edit, and Get Feedback From Everyone

Engage both technical and non-technical reviewers. This ensures the documentation is comprehensible and error-free.

Step 7: Publish

After approval, make documentation accessible to teams or users by linking it within the product dashboard, help centre, or internal knowledge base.

What Are the Best Practices for High-Quality Documentation?

Effective product documentation clearly, accurately, and effectively outlines each stage. Consider the following suggestions to ensure the reliability and accuracy of the document:

1. Adopt a User-first Approach

Think from the user’s perspective. Anticipate their most expected questions and provide task-based guided instructions instead of technical explanations.

2. Uniform Tone and Writing Style

Establish a standard writing style and formatting guidelines for all documents. This will boost readability and build familiarity with the provided documentation, regardless of which team member authored the document.

3. Use Screenshots Or Graphic Illustrations When Necessary

Use screenshots and other forms of graphic illustrations to explain intricate procedures. Visual representation aids users in following the content easily.

4. Facilitate Easy Navigation

Add documents with a searchable table of contents, internal links, and tags. Proper navigation allows users to access the specific information easily.

5. Make Collaborative

Solicit feedback from internal teams and users. Features that enable commenting and editing content, such as Notion and Confluence, make content better over time.

6. Keep Simple And Current

Use plain English and avoid jargon and overly technical language. The documentation should also be regularly updated for changes, additions, or deletions of features and processes.

7. Monitor Usage And Issues

Use analytics or feedback forms to understand the gaps in documentation usage or find out where users are getting stuck. This helps you focus on important fixes.

What Are the Common Challenges in Documentation and How to Solve Them?

1. Outdated Documentation: Documentation that is not updated can confuse users. Consider planning comprehensive content reviews and documentation updates during product release cycles to mitigate these issues.
2. Limited Collaboration Between Teams: Integrating stakeholders from product, engineering, and support teams provides depth and accuracy to the content. Full collaboration guarantees completeness.
3. Rushed Documentation During Launches: Due to time constraints, key details could be missed while documenting. Documentation should be treated as an integral part of product development and planned with utmost attention. 
4. Overly Technical Language: Overly detailed technical descriptions compromise the document’s readability. The use of plain language and validating the content with non-specialists improves inclusivity and increases the chances of greater acceptance.
5. Poor Navigation or Searchability: A poor design model limits users’ search for relevant information. Document organisation, logical content arrangement, header clarity, and incorporation of relevant keywords improve the overall experience
6. Ignoring User Feedback: It can become problematic to overlook feedback users submit during surveys and not address their issues. Their feedback should be actively collected and integrated to enhance the documentation created.

How Can You Measure the Impact of Documentation?

Here are a few metrics that can suggest and improve the influence of your document:

• User Satisfaction: The overall rating or the response to the surveys helps you determine how useful and easy your documentation is to understand. Positive feedback indicates that users are getting what they need.
• Search Productivity: Evaluate how often users look up specific topics in your documentation and what topics they look for. A high search volume alongside many “no results” could point to missing content.
• Support Ticket Volume: If the number of support tickets after documentation updates has dropped, it could indicate that the documentation is enabling users to resolve issues independently as intended.
• Time to Resolution: Gauge the time users take to resolve their issues with the documentation provided. Less time taken means the content is more straightforward and useful.
• Content Engagement: Determine users’ interaction level with your documentation. High engagement demonstrates that the documentation is timely and useful.
• Documentation Access Frequency: Monitor the number of times documentation is accessed, especially after product releases or updates. Increased access means the product is still relevant.
• Churn Rate of Support Agents: A reduced volume of repetitive queries indicates that the documentation helps address these issues.

This list will help you in selecting the best tools to create or manage product documentation:

• Confluence: Highly regarded for creation and collaboration, Confluence is a documentation management system that integrates powerfully with other Atlassian products.

• Notion: With its well-developed UI, Notion is popular among teams as it makes sharing and updating internal or external face documentation simple.

• Zendesk Guide: You can create and integrate helpful documentation into your support systems for your customers through this documentation aid. It provides instant, useful results to the users through AI-powered search.

• GitBook: Especially notable for technical product documentation, this facilitates teams in creating well-structured documentation that is the prime focus of collaboration and versioning, making this an ideal open-source project tool.

• Helpjuice: Specialises in creating and organising knowledge bases and documentation structured for maximum readability. Provides comprehensive analytics to understand how well the documentation is doing.

• Document360: Provides a knowledge base platform with rich, structured tools for documentation authoring, enabling teams to manage different documentation versions while automating workflows for current content.

Conclusion

Well-crafted product documentation is an intuitive resource, aiding business optimisation and growth. It helps reduce the support burden, improve customer satisfaction metrics, and ensure team alignment. Building internal documentation requires following best practices and utilising appropriate tools. At Shiprocket, we recommend starting with a strategy and continuously iterating it so your documentation evolves alongside your product.