Your products may be complex, but to serve your customers well, you need to ensure that your documentation is both simple and easily accessible to your users.
With over 2K installs, Epic Sum Up by APTIS is one of the most popular lean project management apps for Jira on the Atlassian Marketplace. The APTIS team uses Confluence as their internal wiki and the older customer-facing help center was built on another platform that integrates with Confluence.
Epic Sum Up is available on Cloud, Server, and Data Center, which meant that managing documentation for all three app versions separately had become difficult over time. The app also has several feature differences depending on the hosting type, and the team needed a tool that could simplify documentation for all three versions while making it easy for customers to navigate to the right app version.
When the APTIS team decided to redo the documentation for their flagship app, Epic Sum Up, their primary objective was to get rid of its unnecessarily complicated structure.
As APTIS’ flagship app with a significant number of customers, Epic Sum Up is also the app that requires the most documentation. The decision to redo their documentation had been around for a long time because the team was unhappy with its complicated structure.
One of their biggest challenges was having to maintain three separate spaces for the Data Center, Server, and Cloud versions of the app. This was not ideal because, in addition to maintaining each space separately, the team also had to manage versions within these spaces, making it even more complex.
According to the Epic Sum Up team, what really stood out was seeing how we at K15t use Scroll Viewport for our own product documentation across apps.
In addition to it being built on top of Confluence, what the APTIS team really liked about K15t’s documentation was:
The simplicity with which multiple versions and variants are handled.
The ease with which you can switch between versions and variants.
The hassle-free navigation of the help center.
They realized that this overall ease and simplicity would go a long way, not just in creating content but also in updating and maintaining the documentation over time.
A noticeable drawback of the old Epic Sum Up help center was how Cloud customers would often land in the Server documentation space and vice versa because of its multiple spaces and pages. This led to confusion, and unnecessary support tickets were raised that could have been easily handled if the customer could navigate to the right documentation based on their hosting type.
But moving to Scroll Viewport for Confluence solved these concerns and more for Epic Sum Up and its customers.
What stood out the most for them was how easy it was to make the help center look beautiful with minimal effort. Especially for a small team with minimal design skills, just using the available templates and layout editor is enough to present information beautifully. See for yourself!
The easy integration with Scroll Documents for Confluence is what elevated the help center experience even further because customers could now directly land in the right version or variant of the product they were using and find answers to their questions.
It was powerful to see how using labels or conditional content macros on a page would add multiple variants and saved them from the hassle of creating pages over and over again every time there was an update. This made it easy to handle complexity without the added stress.
The APTIS team uses Confluence as their internal wiki and documentation is collaborative to a large extent. While most of it is handled by the support team, other teams like marketing need to constantly be in the loop. Documentation is created collaboratively, with input and knowledge being shared from all sides of the team. As a result, the help center is seen as more than just a place where customers can find answers to specific questions. It’s also a living guide on how to use the product most effectively.
Moving to Scroll Viewport also enabled the APTIS team to fix this missing part in their current customer education strategy.
We certainly are! At K15t, we’re passionate about helping teams share their knowledge freely, simply, and effectively so they can better educate and enable their customers. Scroll Viewport for Confluence is just one of the many ways we do that! Head to our website to learn more about how to simplify and elevate your product documentation and learn a number of Confluence tips and best practices along the way.
How do you ensure your product documentation is simple, hassle-free, and meets the needs of your customers? Are there any best practices you’d like to share that can help others in the community? Let us know in the comments below!
Shannon Meehan _K15t_
Product Marketing Manager
K15t
Stuttgart, Germany
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