Create Help Articles With Confidence Using the New Docs Editor

Self-service content not only plays an important role in saving your team time, but it also empowers your customers to find answers on their own how they want, and when they want. Docs, Help Scout’s knowledge base tool, allows you to provide convenient self-service options to your customers, and can ultimately help you reduce overall support volume by at least 20%.

Because self-service content can play such an important role in your business, we wanted to provide our users with the most simple, enjoyable self-service creation experience possible. 

That’s why we’re presenting you with a new and improved Docs editor.

An enjoyable experience from start to finish

We delivered a content creation experience in line with Help Scout’s principles to empower both Docs beginners and experts alike to create content they’re proud of. A few areas in particular drove the team’s decision-making process along the way:

• Make the article contents accurate and helpful

• Anyone on the team can feel comfortable hopping in to make an update

• No code is required to write and enrich articles

Product Designer, Seán Halpin, shares more on the design behind the new Docs editor experience:

So what’s new with our Docs editor? 

Clean and simple UI

The new Docs editor empowers teams to focus on creating helpful content for customers. Built with convenience in mind, the new Docs editor provides an approachable, streamlined article creation experience by delivering a clean and simple interface, so your team can minimize distractions and stay focused.  No more busy sidebars — instead, open and close the right sidebar as needed while you write your article.

Easily modify text styles, add bulleted lists, or adjust alignment by highlighting text to pull up the contextual toolbar. Or create inline code and other article formatting by using markup. Everything you need to create your article is there when you need it, and can be collapsed when you don’t. 

Intuitive article building

We lowered the barriers to entry when it came to article creation. No IT support required, no coding experience necessary — just an easy, accessible solution that allows non-technical folks to bring their ideas, get them on paper, and publish Docs articles effortlessly. The new shortcut menu enables users to add a variety of elements to articles quickly and easily. To access the shortcut menu, the article components, and plug-in options, users have two options:

1. Use slash commands, ‘/' , when typing in the editor.

   Example: (Type ‘/callout’ to insert callouts or ‘/table’ to insert a table)

2. Click the plus button (+), which will appear at the start of new lines at the end of an article

Once you’ve accessed the shortcut menu, make your articles even more helpful by:

• Utilizing tables to organize complex information.

• Inserting callouts—specially styled blocks with colored backgrounds—to highlight important information.

• Using blockquotes to draw attention to quotes throughout your article.

• Adding images to enhance your writing

Whether you’re a product manager, a customer support specialist, or a marketer, you’ll spend less time trying to figure out how to build articles and more time helping your customers find answers on their own. 

Performance you can trust 

Knowledge bases should exist to alleviate frustrating experiences, not create more of them. That’s why we’ve made performance enhancements to make the editing and publishing experience as smooth as possible.

When drafting in the new editor, your content is auto-saved and will only update the draft version of an article, so you don’t have to worry about getting it right on the first try. The published version of the article will update only when you manually publish the article.

If you do find yourself making a mistake, no worries! You can discard the current draft and revert back to the published version or you can unpublish a published article with the click of a button. With the new Docs editor, you can trust that when you hit publish you’ll see exactly what you set out to create.

Get your creative juices flowing

Have an idea for a new article that your customers will love? Ready to create your first Docs site? Whether you’re a beginner or pro, you can publish something new today! Docs sites are available on all Help Scout plans.