Ask HN: SaaS companies, what do you use for user documentation?

#1

Post by tonytpa » Sat, Jan 06, 2018, 11:22 PM UTC

Do you use an existing solution or have you created your own?

How do you like the solutions you have tried?

Re: Ask HN: SaaS companies, what do you use for user documentation?

#2

Post by matchmike1313 » Sat, Jan 06, 2018, 11:27 PM UTC

Do you mean for help desk articles about the software? If so, we use Intercom's Educate product and love it.

Re: Ask HN: SaaS companies, what do you use for user documentation?

#3

Post by tonytpa » Sat, Jan 06, 2018, 11:36 PM UTC

matchmike1313 wrote: post #2

Do you mean for help desk articles about the software? If so, we use Intercom's Educate product and love it.

Yup, help desk articles, videos, etc. Anything designed to help users learn and progress through the software and ideally reduce churn.

Re: Ask HN: SaaS companies, what do you use for user documentation?

#4

Post by toobulkeh » Sun, Jan 07, 2018, 3:27 AM UTC

Zendesk has a decent Knowledge base system. Intercom is slick, but expensive if you're trying to be frugal. Discourse is the best forum on the OSS market.

Re: Ask HN: SaaS companies, what do you use for user documentation?

#5

Post by mattbgates » Mon, Jan 08, 2018, 8:33 AM UTC

I usually just create a FAQ page with questions I would likely ask. For most of my projects, I actually have my sister beta test for me. While she knows how to use a computer, she is not very tech-savvy, so if she questions something, I know I have to redesign it to make it easier.

Re: Ask HN: SaaS companies, what do you use for user documentation?

#6

Post by zapperdapper » Mon, Jan 08, 2018, 1:09 PM UTC

It depends on so many factors, such as the company, open source or not, the scale, the range of products, size of the doc team, whether you want developer/API and user documentation. It also depends how you define user!

You could use something like GitHub markdown/GitHub pages. You could use something like Markdown and a custom script like I do for my website (source code in my GitHub). There are solutions like Sphinx (as used by Python) or Jekyll for building a static docs site. You could also use Hugo static site generator etc. etc. - there are many tools out there. These are simple solutions but it ranges up to heavy weight tools like DITA/DocBook (not that I am recommending those in this case).

Also take a look at readthedocs.org.

If you are documenting a SaaS REST API Swagger has become something of a standard.