Defragmenting the Product Documentation for More Context and Better Understanding

[katieott]

Back in November Darrin wrote a blog post about how we are transforming the ServiceNow Information Experience. One of the major changes we are making is around the way the content on our Product Documentation site is structured.

Tell me if this sounds familiar. You do a search on the Product Documentation site. You think you've found the right search result only to get to an article with a small bit of text and a laundry list of links to pick from. You start to long for the days where all that information was on one page so you could scroll to find the information you are looking for. Sound familiar?

This has been a major area of frustration for our customers and that is why we have taken this first step to improve the overall quality of our documentation.

We tackle the problem in two different ways:

1. Re-architecting the topics to be more comprehensive.
2. On page navigation.

Re-architecting topics

First, we realized that a lot of the content is split up and organized in ways that does not make a whole lot of sense to our customers. To address this our writers re-architected many of our topics to make them more comprehensive, often combining a bunch of small topics into one.

The Discovery basics topic is a perfect example of what this looks now, compared to the same topic in Helsinki.

On Page Navigation

After re-architecting, these more comprehensive pages can be long and contain many separate topics.   To help you go directly to the information you need we have added a mini-TOC on the right side of the article.   This on page navigation also helps you to browse the content and then quickly jump back up to an interesting part of the article.

There are several examples of this on our site including this "installed with" HR topic. Compare it to the version we published in Helsinki to see the big difference both the re-architecture and the mini-TOC make.

The scope of this project was huge. In Kingston alone we have over 13,000 topics. Multiply that by all the releases we support and the number grows to 65,000+ topics. We knew we couldn't get to all of these topics so we decided to work on the topics that get the most use focusing on the Istanbul through Kingston releases. As you navigate the Product Documentation site and you find areas you think we missed, please use the Send Feedback option to let us know.

For a new and neat way to search multiple ServiceNow resources in one place, check out Save Time and Increase Efficiency with HI's New Unified Search.

How can we improve your information experience?