Way back in the early 2010s, I remember explaining my concept of a perfect Help site as a collection of documents in a bucket with no organization whatsoever. People were already coming to Help articles primarily through Search by then. I felt that through a combination of metatags and a powerful search engine, the organized Help site with the ubiquitous tree navigation would be dead soon. Here we are a decade and a half later and the navigation tree persists. With this record of making predictions behind me, I am ready to make another one. Read on at your own peril.
There are essentially two types of people who come to a Help site – current users, which includes internal folk, and prospective users. With the advent of GPT-based support within the product, the existing users will no longer need to come to the Help site directly any more. They will simply open the GPT bot within the interface and ask the bot their questions. This leaves the prospective users and I believe that companies will begin to have a separate site for them that will be a little more detailed than the marketing page, but essentially marketing-oriented content – loads of adjectives and promises of better this and easier that.
Nobody reads Help like they would a book. The only reason for the navigation tree and all the time wasted on the perfect organization of the items on that tree are the prospective users – to give them an idea of the workflow in the product. How else can you explain putting set up instructions as the top node in a Help system? There is an argument to be made for a team that focuses on a Help site that is not too content heavy but at the same time gives users a fair idea of how the product works. Call it technical-writing lite, or better yet product-documentation lite. The site can be colorful, filled with flowcharts and process diagrams that show how the various parts of the product interact.
The main Help site will be structure free. GPTs are pretty good at making connections from seemingly random articles to answer any questions users may throw at it. This superpower of GPTs opens up interesting possibilities on what could be the source of the content it ingests. Apart from the Help articles, we can now imagine it having access to product specifications, error logs, the backend database, support conversations, and so much more.
So does this mean that we will stop publishing Help sites? Hardly! We will still continue to publish the Help site to the web, but what will change is the way in which people interact with the site. The bot will be the primary interface and it will not be limited to the knowledge in the Help site.
It is an exciting world we are walking into – actually correct that, we are rushing headlong into it.
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