Context

When I interviewed with Sea Limited, it was for a writer role, but I aimed for a content designer title within the team. During the interview process, I spoke with the stakeholders on possible knowledge base improvements.

After the interview, I was offered a product manager role instead and was given free reign to improve the knowledge base's content and features.

After I was onboarded in Jan 2021, my immediate plan was:

1. to audit the existing knowledge base;

2. to determine and execute improvements; and

3. to measure success metrics.

I wanted to at least complete 1 iteration in Q1 of 2021.

Help center prior to the audit

This was a quick sample screenshot of the help center prior to the audit.

Interview users

I wanted to interview the main users of the help center. After speaking with colleagues, because the product was still relatively new externally, this group was our business development representatives ("BDRs") we had and their customers.

Our users often reached out to our sales representatives for answers and help in using the software. In some cases, our articles are shared to the users by the sales representatives but many times, the users still come back to ask for specific guidance.

There are a few possible reasons for this:

• Our users don't seem to want to self-serve.

• Our documentation is not helpful enough.

  • Is our documentation precise?

  • Is our documentation scannable?

  • Is our documentation searchable?

• Our users have very specific requirements that cannot be answered via documentation.

  • Not true.

  • BDs often have to repeat themselves with new customers.

Because of these findings, I knew our initial success metrics must be whether these users still reach out after our BDRs respond with a help article.

Process

For this project, I wanted to:

• Audit existing articles

• Create new articles when needed

• Implemented new features to the help center.

Audit existing articles

I developed a process to audit the help center content and enlisted the help of a new hire.

Because of the audit, I had to also create a style guide for the help center. When I joined, the help center had no style guide and the articles were inconsistent.

By following the flowchart I set out for every article in the help center, the new hire and myself revamped the articles. For this, we used an Airtable as a database to ensure we completed every article. It was manual but sorely needed.

Create new articles

I also dove deeper into the product of SeaTalk. It was not only a work messenger, but also had office automation and human resource features as well.

Due to this, I came up with a high level content architecture that I would refine and develop as I work through the audit. You can see a sample of this below:

From this architecture, I could see the gaps that the help center had and wrote new articles to close these gaps.

Implement new features

The help center missed crucial features compared to our competitors and I worked with designers and developers to implement them:

• Call outs

• Table of contents

• Breadcrumb navigation

Apart from this, our help center had localized versions — for this, I had to set up and implement new processes for more efficient and accurate localization (e.g. when an English article is updated, the translators will be notified to localize the updated article).

Help center after the audit

A sample screenshot of how the help center looked after the audit. Notice the simpler and more consistent articles titles for example.

Results

Overall:

• I created and wrote a style guide for the help center, referencing public style guides.

• I set up new processes, including audit, writing, and localization.

• I audited, refined, and created new articles for the help center, essentially writing 97 articles.

• I created new features for the help center, including a moving table of contents and breadcrumb navigation.

The first iteration of the revamp was completed in March 2021.

I interviewed the BDs and with the new articles, the email replies dropped by about 30-50%. Their users were still used to the high touch that they provided. However, anecdotally, the BDs themselves found it easier to guide their users by referencing the revamped articles. I encouraged them to actually slowly teach their users how to rely on the help center and provide feedback as well.

This is not a success metric, but it was interesting to see that the organic traffic tripled in 3 months after I joined.

December 2020

Feb 2021 — I missed saving the March 2021 screenshot. March 2021 had 3.3k users.

You can still see the live help center. However, please note that it may be taken down any time and screenshots may be broken as the site is no longer maintained.