Confluence Essentials
Confluence Cloud Best Practices
.svg?cb=de4c4813284972f3a2aa9512cc943b23)
Confluence Use Cases
Confluence News
Documentation Guide
Engage: Content Optimization for You AND Your Users
Steffen Burzlaff
author |
|---|
You’ve done the hard work:
you planned your documentation with purpose,
and published it where your users can find it.
But publishing isn’t the finish line. It’s the start of a new phase in your content’s lifecycle: content optimization.
Because you want your content to help your users. You want to share knowledge and make sure they can find what they’re looking for. But that only works if your users find it valuable as well.
In this article, we’ll show you:
how to analyze your content’s performance, and
how to solicit and act on your reader's feedback to optimize your content.
But first, let’s dig into why listening to your users is so important.
Why Content Optimization Matters
Let’s take our example company ‘Good Software' from our previous steps. They have planned their documentation for their audience. They made sure to produce understandable content and keep it up to date. But this was all done from a one-sided perspective, theirs. It didn’t involve the actual users.
Their users have different backgrounds, priorities, and depth of knowledge of the app. They also have different preferences on how to consume content. This leads to different understandings and preferred ways of consuming content.
Everyone knows the situation in school where the teacher explains something and some understand it right away and others don’t, they need a different way of explanation. But how does the teacher know so they can improve? Either they read between the lines (by trying to interpret facial expressions) or they simply ask.
Bringing this back to the Good Software example, even though they did their best to provide understandable content, they don’t know if it's optimized for everyone’s needs. They need to read between the lines or ask for feedback. Otherwise, the consequences could be more requests in support and/or unhappy users.
Key Signals for When to Optimize
There are signals which are straight forward like direct feedback regarding your content. But there can also be signals which are not so obvious, like low engagement or repetitive questions.
Low engagement
If your content receives very few views, or users visit it and quickly leave, it’s worth asking yourself why. Maybe it’s hard to find. Maybe the title doesn’t match what people are searching for. Or perhaps the content is technically correct but not actually helpful.
Low engagement could suggest that your product already explains something really well, so your help article isn’t really needed. On the other hand, a well visited documentation page might indicate that the product doesn’t explain the topic well, which is why users need to visit the documentation. Learn more about the stages of communication.
Identifying low engagement with Confluence
If you're on the Confluence premium or enterprise plan, you already have access to helpful statistics about your content’s performance via Confluence Analytics. You can see if people have seen your content, how often they come back, and which pages are *tumbleweed*.
Using apps in Confluence
In case you’re not on a premium or enterprise plan or Confluence Analytics doesn’t provide enough detail, you’ll find apps for tracking views and engagement on the Atlassian Marketplace. One example is Communardos Viewtracker, where you can get page view insights, track user activity & generate user engagement analytics reports with strong data privacy focus.
Repetitive questions
Repetitive questions regarding your content are an indirect signal, as at the beginning it might not be obvious that there is something missing in your content. Sometimes it’s also hard to keep track of it because of how the question was asked or because several days have passed.
A rule of thumb is: If the question you receive is generic enough, then optimize your content to answer the question. This way, the question might not rise in the future for other users. What a generic question is, depends highly on the piece of content and is up to you to decide.
Direct Feedback
The clearest signal your content needs optimizing is receiving direct feedback. Whether a reader leaves a comment, sends an email etc., providing feedback on what’s missing or isn’t clear is very valuable.
Collecting feedback using Confluence
Confluence offers the functionality of page comments and inline comments to leave feedback for content. Inline comments are great for when readers want to leave feedback on a very specific part of your content.
Using Apps in Confluence
If you publish your content via Scroll Viewport (soon to become Scroll Sites) you can embed any external feedback tools you need. Hyvor Talk as a commenting tool or a Jira Service Management widget can be embedded right from the App UI.
I Have Something to Optimize, Now What?
Once you have collected or received potential optimization tips for your content, start
the content lifecycle from the beginning: plan how you will incorporate the feedback, modify the content, and publish it again. For detailed instructions on content optimization, take a look at the
content creation part of our series.
A quick overview on tips to improve your content:
Fix unclear or confusing sections.
Update screenshots and provide more context.
Add structure like headings or tables.
Fill in missing steps or context.
Make titles more searchable and relevant.
Of course, the optimization cycle won’t take as long as creating your content did, but make sure to walk through each step every time to ensure helpful and high quality content for your users.
Conclusion
If you followed the content lifecycle series from start to finish, your content should be in good shape and valuable to your users. But since it's a ‘lifecycle’, the last step is also the beginning of the cycle. This last step will reveal content optimizations, which will trigger the first step of planning again.
Do you need to start the cycle with every change? It depends. While evaluating the feedback from your users, you can judge if this is a critical piece of information missing or if it’s ok if this is published a bit later.
We recommend setting a time and workload limit. E.g., update your content every two weeks if there are improvements for it, or update it earlier if the improvements feel like important enough.
