As a product owner, you're responsible for creating and maintaining a great user experience. This includes building a product that is intuitive, easy to learn and understand, and provides the best customer experience possible.
When it comes to documentation, it's just as important that your documentation be clear and easy to navigate. If your users need help finding the information they need or need help understanding how to use your product, they cannot complete their tasks. This can lead to frustration and even negative reviews, ultimately hurting your company's reputation.
Here's a list of features that all excellent enterprise product documentation platforms should have:
Responsive Design
Responsive design is a technique that ensures that content can be easily viewed on any device. It is an essential feature of documentation platforms like docsie.io since it provides that your users will be able to access your documentation regardless of their device or browser type. If a user cannot access your documentation, they will probably not be able to perform the required tasks and use your product as intended.
The following are some of the benefits of using a responsive design for your enterprise product's documentation platform:
• It can increase user engagement by ensuring that the user has access to all the information they need at all times, irrespective of their location or device type.
• It ensures that users do not have to spend time searching for information on different devices and browsers, thus saving them valuable time and allowing them to complete their tasks quickly and efficiently.
• It reduces support costs by preventing users from having issues caused by incompatibility between devices, browsers, and end-user operating systems.
Built-in Features
An excellent enterprise product documentation platform has the following features built-in:
Attachments - A sound product documentation system should allow you to attach documents, images, and other files to your documentation. This makes it easy for you to share information with your team or customers.
Versioning - The ability to create different versions of documents is critical when working with multiple people on the same document. Each person can work on their document version and then compare changes with other team members later. This allows everyone to work independently without waiting for someone else to finish.
Customization - Customizing your documentation system is essential for many companies because it allows them to fit their needs ideally instead of using a generic system that isn't designed for their specific needs or business model.
Security - Security is essential because it ensures that all critical information remains confidential and cannot be accessed by unauthorized users who may have malicious intentions toward your company or its employees.
Customer Support Integration
Customer support is one of the most critical aspects of any enterprise product documentation platform. This is because it is often your customers' first point of contact, and it can be the difference between a great customer experience and a poor one.
You need a system that allows you to track issues as they arise, assign them to the right people, and resolve them as quickly as possible. This requires a clear workflow and good communication between members of your team.
The best enterprise product documentation platforms will allow you to integrate your customer support software so that you can see all issues in one place. They should also allow you to automatically route issues to relevant people based on their expertise or geographic location.
This saves time and money because it means no more having to manually update spreadsheets or emails when an issue arises (which never goes smoothly). It also ensures that staff gets all the vital information that could affect their ability to resolve a problem quickly.
Highly Customizable
The product documentation platform must be highly customizable. If a product has many features, then the documentation should too. The user should be able to change things such as colors, fonts, formatting, and layout.
Also, it is essential that there are different themes available for the platform. This way, when one brand updates its color scheme or logo, it can easily update its documentation without starting over from scratch.
The product documentation platform should also make it easy for users to add new pages and sections to their documents. For example, suppose a company creates a new product line. In that case, it should be able to add information without waiting for the company's design team or IT department to create new pages and sections in their system or CMS (content management system).
Collaborative Editing Tools
The ability to collaborate on documents is a crucial feature of most enterprise product documentation platforms. When you're working with technical content, it's essential that you can share it easily with your team members, who can then provide feedback and make suggestions for improvement.
Collaboration tools allow users to work together on a document, even if they're not working from the exact location. This feature is handy when working with global teams or remote employees who are only sometimes in the office.
These tools can also be helpful if multiple people need to update a document simultaneously. Collaboration tools help ensure that everyone is using the latest version of a document and prevents conflicts over changes made by other users.
Some enterprise product documentation platforms offer collaboration tools embedded directly into the editor itself — either as part of the editor itself or as an add-on tool that can be used alongside other editors.
Seamless Workflows
An excellent enterprise product documentation platform considers workflow efficiency when developing its features. For example, suppose you are creating an online training module that requires approval before publication. In that case, the platform should have an automated workflow for this process so you don't have to approve each module version before it goes live manually. This streamlined approval process should also provide analytics so you can see who viewed each version of the module and whether there was any feedback afterward. This information is invaluable for improving future versions of your training modules or products like them.
Strong Search Capabilities
One of the essential features of a product documentation platform is its ability to search for content, which is why it's so critical to choose a platform with powerful search capabilities. The best enterprise product documentation platforms can search for words within a document, across multiple copies, and even within other file types such as PDFs. An excellent product documentation platform will also allow users to create their custom searches based on whatever criteria they need.
In addition to searching by keyword, an enterprise product documentation platform should also be able to search by tag or topic. This allows users to find all documents related to a particular subject and filter them by date or author name.
Clear and Organized
The best product documentation platform will be clear and organized. This means that a person can find the information they're looking for quickly without digging through pages of text. A good product documentation platform will make it easy for people to understand how your software works, how to use it, and what features are available.
An excellent enterprise product documentation platform will have a user-friendly interface that allows you to create documentation in minutes. It should also include customizable templates to generate documentation for each product quickly.
Bottom Line
The importance of product documentation can't be overstated. A clear and helpful set of instructions, guides, and other supporting material can attract and retain customers, help keep them from contacting support, and increase engagement and sales. However, there are a lot of products to choose from where product documentation is concerned (even for enterprise-level businesses), which makes it easier than ever for customers to flounder in the process. By carefully assessing each platform's features—quickly done with the guide above—you can find a system like docsie.io that perfectly suits your business needs.
