Embed the docs!

Description

Documentation for most web applications today still follows the cognitive model of the good old fashioned documentation manual: While there might be some help content in the UI, the actual documentation manual in most cases lives as a separate object that is except for a few deep links on particularly troublesome areas, only accessible through a top domain.

But it doesn’t have to be this way, we should be perfectly able to predict what help resources a particular type of user might need on a given page, or functional state of a web application. Why do we force our users to leave our application, so that they can loose their context while searching for answers on Google?

In this talk I want to talk about a paradigm for embedded help that makes documentation content available right in the application, no matter if it’s a video tutorial, Walkthrough, or page in the manual. I will also introduce EmbedHelp, an open source embeddable widget that makes it easy for non-technical authors to implement this paradigm.

  • Conference: Write the Docs NA
  • Year: 2016

About the speaker

Kristof Van Tomme