Help Center Design

[Amy Baker]

We are starting a review of our customer Help Center to refresh and update the design and usability. I would love to see some examples of the amazing work I am sure you all have done. Would anyone be willing to share their designs as either an image (if site is secured) or links (if site is available to the public)? 

[Kris Klima _K15t_]

Hi @Amy Baker and welcome to the Community.

Since this is filed under JSM, I presume that you're using the Knowledge Base feature and make your Confluence content available in JSM (or a variation of this approach).

Or are you looking into splitting the two? Let's face it, JSM isn't the best tool in which one makes documentation available to customers (whether public or protected).

Anyway, I'd advise to ask questions like:

• How do our users use / want to use documentation?
• Do we want a public or protected site? Would we benefit to have both?
• Is your product 'one size fits all' or do you have versions (like 1.0, 2.0) or any other segmentation?
• Are there any limits in our current setup? Such as convoluted workflow, publishing dependencies...
• Are you documentation process (your docs life-cycle management) working smoothly? Or is there room for improvement.
• Should we create a genuine Help Center with advanced content (and content management) features that's focused on documentation, and then integrate that Help Center with JSM?

Back in my 'clinical practice' of tech writer and docs content manager, I would use opportunities like yours to do dig deeper and look into the overal documentation strategy.

Prior to my current role, I built these two sites from Confluence.

• https://docs.emplifi.io/platform/latest/home/ (this one also has an internal version, both originate from a single Confluence space).
• https://agent-docs.emplifi.io/home/Production/

The gist about how they work (including backend setup) is here in my older Community articles - they may not match your use case 100% but may inspire you.

• How to build a product documentation solution in 30 minutes
• Product docs reloaded - semantic versioning meets continuous delivery

I prefered circumventing customer support tools (Zendesk, Jira, etc.) as documentation hosts and look at integration options. 

[Amy Baker]

We are using the customer Help Center in JSM, our portal url is WVU IT Help Center - Jira Service Management. Our knowledge is currently publicly available, and you have to authenticate to submit most requests. So, yes, the knowledge space linking is already in place. We are looking at design and layout. We also will likely be adding more Help Centers in the near future, so this is a good time to give the visuals and UX an upgrade. 

[Susan Waldrip]

Hi @Amy Baker , I took a look at your Help Center landing page and how you organized the info, it's very clean and easy to understand what the site offers. Nice job!