When you develop software, one of the most important ways to ensure user success and satisfaction is by making it easy for them to use your product. High-quality end user documentation is step one toward reaching that goal.
However, balancing the need for high-quality documentation with your team’s time constraints can be a challenge. How do you create documentation efficiently without sacrificing quality?
In this blog, we’ll explore Confluence as a tool for external documentation and give you a few tips for creating documentation that will set your users up for success.
Why Use Confluence for User Documentation?
Many technical teams already use Confluence for their internal documentation because of its integration with other tools, like Jira Service Management, which is commonly used as a help center and can pull from Confluence spaces to increase ticket deflection.
Although Confluence is typically thought of as an internal workspace for teams to collaborate and share knowledge, it can also serve as your base for end user documentation. Creating your external documentation in the same tool as your internal documentation helps you manage costs by consolidating the number of tools your team uses.
Using Confluence for both internal and external documentation also makes cross-functional collaboration between the documentation team and the product team more effective. When they are not siloed in their own tools, sharing information is faster and easier.
Finally, Confluence is easy to manage. As you add and improve product features, you will need to update your user documentation, and Confluence provides an intuitive, user-friendly interface that users of any experience level can jump into quickly.
Back to topHow to Build Successful User Documentation in Confluence
To build successful documentation in Confluence, you’ll need to follow many of the same principles that you would use to create successful documentation anywhere—be clear, organized, and comprehensive.
However, here are a few tips that will help you as you dive into documentation within Confluence.
Create a New Space
The first thing you’ll want to do as you start creating your user documentation in Confluence is set up a separate space for your documentation to live.
You don’t want public-facing pages to be mixed with internal documentation that may contain confidential information, so to avoid any confusion or mistakes, keep everything that’s meant to be public in its own space.
Even though your user documentation will be contained in its own space, it’s still easy to jump between Confluence spaces if you need to access information in another space as you build your documentation.
Communicate Clearly
When you are creating Confluence pages to be viewed by an audience, it’s always important to do everything you can to make the information you’re presenting clear and engaging.
The first way to do that is by breaking information up into digestible chunks. It’s difficult to read a large block of text, especially on a screen, and it will frustrate your users if they need to spend hours reading dense pages to find what they need. Writing shorter sentences and paragraphs will make your documentation look cleaner and serve your users better.
Along with structuring your content in easy-to-digest blocks, Confluence offers plenty of ways to customize your pages, making them more appealing to viewers.
For example, you can call out important details in a colored panel that stands out from the rest of the text and use page templates to ensure consistency across your docs.
Want to learn more about making your Confluence documentation stand out? Check out our blog on creating engaging Confluence pages.
Visualize Information
Communicating clearly with words is important—but sometimes, it’s more effective to communicate through visuals.
Does your documentation involve complex processes? Does it describe certain structures that help your users understand proper configuration? These are just a couple examples of situations where a diagram can enhance the value of your user documentation.
There are plenty of diagramming tools that can help you visualize information, but to keep things simple and efficient, we recommend using a tool that is directly integrated with Confluence, like Gliffy.
This means you’ll never have to separately log in to other tools or switch back and forth between tools to build your diagrams and connect them into your documentation.
Want to learn more? Watch our tutorial on how to add diagrams to Confluence.
Publish Your Documentation
When it’s time to make your product documentation available to your users, you’ll need to publish it—and you probably don’t want it to look like a Confluence space when you do that.
To make your documentation look more professional and match your brand, you can use certain add-ons to Confluence to customize and publish your space, like K15t’s Scroll Apps for Confluence.
Publishing directly from Confluence through an app like this makes your documentation easy to update and maintain.
Back to topMore Confluence Tips and Best Practices
If your team is all in on Confluence for user documentation, you’re probably building your team’s internal documentation in Confluence as well. We have plenty of resources to help you along the way 👇
- Ebook: Your Guide to Building Software Documentation
- Blog: 4 Ways to Supercharge Your Confluence Documentation
- Blog: Software Architecture Documentation Dos and Don’ts
- Blog: 5 Confluence Apps for Your Internal Knowledge Base
To keep up with the latest Confluence and documentation tips and best practices, make sure to follow us on LinkedIn and subscribe to our newsletter.