Canopy Knowledge Base

OVERVIEW

I spent 2.5 years as the sole author for all of Canopy's Knowledge Base content. In that time, I completed various projects to make Canopy's help resources more accessible and more comprehensive. I migrated the knowledge base to a new content management system, cutting our CMS costs by 85% while improving the user experience and brand alignment drastically. I wrote hundreds of articles for the knowledge base, working especially closely with Canopy's QA team to test and document new features and provide educational resources for users on launch. I wrote, animated, and edited videos for different features to appeal to visual and auditory learners. I also linked my in-app guides to articles to appeal to hands-on learners.

This portfolio piece will show some of the different major projects I completed related to the knowledge base. For writing examples, you can still refer to most of Canopy's active knowledge base. I am still responsible for writing a majority of the content that exists there.

GOALS

  • Provide accessible training materials that account for different learning styles
  • Write clear, concise, and actionable articles for Canopy's new features
  • Maintain Canopy branding and follow Canopy's content guidelines
  • Thoroughly test and document features to ensure no surprises or bugs for users

GOALS

  • In order to reach the most users effectively, knowledge bases should offer content for all learning styles. Including videos, visuals, or in-app guides can make your resources more accessible.
  • Keep training consistent so that users can spend time learning the product rather than learning how to interpret the provided resources.
  • Don't be boring, but don't be cutesy. Flowery, joke-laden language can distract users from learning and hinder problem solving, which is kind of the whole point of knowledge bases.
  • Center the user and then get out of their way. Don't try to market to them with help resources - if you solve their problems efficiently you'll gain their loyalty and their cash.

ROLE

Content Designer

Technical writing, graphic design, UX design, Markup, HTML, CSS, Javascript, Content Management Systems, API Documentation, Documentation as Code, Instructional Design

MY INPUT

  • Write, edit, and maintain 350+ knowledge base articles
  • Create visual assets to accompany articles (images, screenshots, gifs, videos, illustrations)
  • Thoroughly test new features, especially in unconventional ways to account for all user experiences
  • Research, select, and migrate to a new CMS to cut costs and improve UX
  • Maintain Canopy branding on knowledge base website - the old knowledge base looked bland and disconnected, lowering user trust
  • Created clear and concise documentation. Followed familiar patterns with each article to encourage users to learn our product, not our documeentation.
Although I passed knowledge base responsibilities off in 2022, the majority of Canopy's current help center articles were still written by me. You can view the live knowledge base here.

Redesign and Migration

When I first joined Canopy, they had just moved to a new knowledge base platform that was frankly exorbitantly priced, and far too early stage of a company to provide everything a knowledge base needed. It was one of the first observations I made to the team.

I could create a better knowledge base for far cheaper on a different platform

With leadership's blessing, I began researching all of the different platforms out there. Soliciting input from key stakeholders in Marketing, Support and Success, and User Experience, I narrowed our choices down to Hubspot (marketing's preference), Zendesk (Success' preference), Helpjuice, and Madcap Flare. I was fairly opposed to Hubspot's solution because of the lack of customization and the poor authoring capabilities. We eliminated Madcap Flare for similar reasons - as a UX team, we just didn't love the end-user experience. Zendesk was the probably the preferred choice of everyone, but when it came down to it, Zendesk was simply too expensive for us at the time. Enter Helpjuice.

With Helpjuice, I was able to reduce our costs by 85%. I also handled all of the styling, design, and building of the website myself, saving Canopy developer time and money estimated at around $15,000.

One of the most important problems I wanted to solve with this redesign was improving the user experience of the website. The old site didn't really have any of Canopy's branding. This made it look unprofessional, and separate from Canopy's actual product. By creating new illustrations for this redesign and implementing Canopy's logo and footer, I was able to tie the knowledge base to Canopy's product.

Another UX experience that was lacking was the search engine. We wanted to be able to surface help articles to clients in an instant. The old knowledge base did not allow us to order articles as desired, and its search engine required a 100% title match to find anything. By using Helpjuice, I was able to implement a new search engine that learned which articles were most popular. It also searched all of an article's content, allowing us to cut the bounce rate in half, from 32% to 15%. Serving users the articles they need when they ask for them is key to enabling self-service and freeing up time for success reps.

Image sliders don't work on mobile :S

The Article Guts

I regret that I no longer have accessible copies of my written articles to show here. Below, I've provided what fragments I could find - Most are related to the documentation of a specific feature that I was pretty proud of. Canopy implemented a new feature called automation rules to tasks. Essentially, users could automate different actions to take place based on selected triggers in tasks.

This was a big feature release, in terms of functionality and in terms of complexity. We really wanted to see adoption on this feature because it was something that had been requested for some time. That said, we understood that the complexity of it might scare some users off. The article needed to be thorough and clear. It needed to make automation rules appear simple, even to our non-tech-savvy accountant users.

The article I created was exhaustive. It appealed to reading learners, visual learners (with photos and gifs), and hands-on learners (with an accompanying user guide in-app). I also worked particularly closely with the UX designer and PM assigned to this feature to identify and document a number of common automations we expected users might want to create. Often, I feel like documentation fails to show real-world usage scenarios and I'm always trying to add those where possible. These common automations helped users better understand the capabilities of automation rules and how they might use them in their practice.

I've also added what other fragments I have from articles I've written. In some, you'll see I documented some writing and formatting guidelines for each article so that our intern (the person to whom I handed the reins to) could create articles using the same structure and formatting as I had. Again, consistency helps users know how to use your help resources and saves them time in learning.

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Making things accessible

I've mentioned throughout this portfolio item how important it is to take into account different learning styles with help resources. I think we've probably all had the experience where we buy something and get home to find instructions that don't fit our learning style. I tried to hang a TV a few months ago and about lost my mind trying to make sense of the picture-only mounting instructions.

I have user guides in a separate portfolio piece, but I made user guides to go with higher level processes and appeal to those who like to learn by doing. For especially difficult features, I created and animated videos to appeal to visual and auditory learners. I also always made sure that each written step on documentation had an accompanying screenshot or gif to add some visual appeal to each article.

I've included two videos below that were created for the knowledge base. The first, File Migration, was created at the request of support. Users struggled with our file migration tool and support wanted to be able to send a video walkthrough to them. After this video was made, we saw an uptick in file migrations, helping our users move nearly 20,000 files to Canopy in just 3 months.

The second video is related to File Editing with the Desktop assistant. This was a big feature release for Canopy and we wanted to drive adoption as best we could. Because so much of file editing took place outside of Canopy, we also wanted to be able to show a full walkthrough of how to use the feature on each user's computer. We didn't have the option of an in-app guide because so much took place outside of the app.