Step-by-step guides are the foundation of your documentation and a must-have if you want to enable product growth .
Proper documentation can be a great help when outsourcing processes, hiring new employees, and training customers how to use your product properly.
This article will cover the key elements of a good product guide and the tools that can help you put them into practice.
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TL;DR
- A step-by-step guide is a resource designed to help any employee or client follow and complete required tasks. It outlines and describes each step to successfully carry out a process.
- Creating step-by-step tutorials is essential for any growing business. It facilitates knowledge sharing (allowing users to quickly access information), reduces human error, and lowers operating costs.
- A good step-by-step guide should be easy for anyone to understand, define clear chronological steps to complete the process, and include additional formats such as videos and visuals to complement the guide.
- There are four steps to documenting and using your processes:
- Talk with your team to identify the processes that need to be documented and create a draft.
- Research your target audience and build an accurate persona of the person who will be reading the guide (whether employees or customers).
- Outline and draft your guide. Add as many details as possible.
- Add checklists to your guides and list each task in chronological order.
- Here are some tips for creating step-by-step instructions:
- Create interactive journeys where each new step is triggered when the user completes the previous step.
- Embed your step-by-step guides in your resource center so users can refer to them whenever they need them.
- Structure your guides and create paths so that users only need to read part of the article to find the information they’re looking for.
- Use AI to generate and embed videos in app guides simply by typing text. The integration between Synthesia and Userpilot makes this possible.
- Implement localization and offer guidance in multiple languages to make it easier for non-native English speakers to understand and reproduce your instructions.
- Gather feedback from your students and improve your guides based on user feedback.
- Regularly update your instructions and keep your documentation up to date.
- Here are three tools you can use to make step-by-step guides take less time:
- Userpilot is a customer success tool that can help you guide your users with UI patterns like modals, tooltips , interactive walkthroughs , and more. Additionally, you can build your knowledge base and personalize your content based on user segments.
- Scribe is an app that can record your screen while performing a task and instantly create a guide with screenshots and detailed instructions.
- Loom is the ideal app for asynchronous communication and recording video tutorials that you can use to complement your process documentation (as well as collaborate with your teammates).
What are step-by-step guides in SaaS?
In SaaS, a step-by-step guide is a resource intended to outline and describe each step in a process. It’s designed so that any employee or customer can follow it and successfully complete the required tasks.
For digital adoption, documentation is key to keeping users engaged with your product and breaking down complex tasks into simple process documents.
How do step-by-step guides benefit your business?
Documenting your process is beneficial and necessary for any business that wants to scale.
Its main advantages are:
Better knowledge sharing
According to McKinsey , employees spend 20% of their workweek searching for information about a task.
With proper documentation, your team can quickly access this information whenever they need it. It also makes it easier to onboard new employees without major friction.
And finally, your customers won’t have to wait hours for answers to their simple questions. They’ll solve their problems instantly on their own thanks to self-service guides.
Preventing human errors
By creating and distributing practical guides that describe key business processes, you can avoid many of the errors caused by inadequate procedures.
Your customer service agents are human, and they can also make mistakes frequently. Think of new employees who aren’t yet familiar with the ins and outs of the product, or the exhausted agent another customer contacted at the end of a long workday.
With stable documentation, all your agents have to do is direct their customers to those resources.
Lower operating costs
With efficient knowledge sharing and a reduction in human error, your operating costs will inevitably decrease as a result of fewer errors and more efficient tasks.
Key features and elements of effective step-by-step guides
Now, what makes a good guide? Here’s what you should look for:
Easy-to-understand language and instructions
Accessibility is essential for a step-by-step guide. An important part of accessibility is writing clearly and concisely. The general rule is: if there’s room to cut a word, do so. Make it as easy as possible.
A good guide should be able to take a seemingly complex task and break it down into multiple, simple steps that anyone can understand. They should also have a clear idea of what success looks like and what mistakes to avoid.
Clearly defined chronological steps
However, dividing a process into steps isn’t enough if it doesn’t follow a logical order. That’s why you should number each step of the task in a chronological flow.
A good tip is to use checklists to organize the steps in the correct order and make them easier to follow.
Visual content and examples
While text is the primary medium for documenting your processes, effective step-by-step guides should also include visual aids and videos to better explain the process.
They can be used to teach how to navigate your product’s interface, clarify concepts, ease the learning curve, or supplement your current resources.
Loom’s video tutorials are a great example, as they are very short videos that explain specific tasks to the user and can be found within the app (without having to leave it).
How to document any process with step-by-step guides
Despite following best practices, you may still need guidance on how to get started with your documentation. Here’s our four-step process for getting started:
1. Identify what processes you are documenting
First of all, you need to know exactly what you want to document.
Take a look at what your team does repeatedly and ask them which processes are worth documenting.
Next, draft your assignment that includes the following:
- The name of the task
- The objective
- Deliverables
- Definition of «fact»
Este borrador le ayudará a establecer el ámbito de trabajo de cada tarea y le dará una idea básica de su aspecto.
2. Defina a los usuarios y conozca a su público objetivo
No puedes explicar algo sin saber a quién te diriges.
Por eso debe definir su público objetivo con una persona usuaria.
Tanto si la guía va dirigida a los empleados como a los clientes, debe centrarse en los aspectos importantes, como las tareas a realizar, los puntos débiles, las responsabilidades, las motivaciones, etc.
Y para construir su personaje con eficacia, debe recopilar los datos de entrevistas, comentarios de los clientes y microencuestas. Un personaje ficticio será inútil.
Tomemos como ejemplo a este responsable de marketing de producto:
3. Esbozar cada paso del proceso y redactar el contenido
Con los procesos y el perfil de su público objetivo a mano, puede empezar con el proceso de creación.
En primer lugar, haz un esquema del recurso que vas a elaborar.
Si se trata de un PNT, crea encabezados para cada paso del proceso y añade notas sobre lo que implica la tarea y lo que no hay que hacer.
Una vez que tengas un esquema decente, empieza la sesión de escritura y explica cada proceso con un mayor nivel de detalle. Asegúrate de desglosar la información con viñetas, GIF, infografías o tutoriales en vídeo para que sea más fácil de digerir.
Y al final, es una buena idea realizar al menos una ronda de edición para asegurarse de que la redacción es clara, concisa y no distrae al usuario con información innecesaria.
4. Utilizar barras de progreso y listas de control para indicar los avances
Una vez terminado el recurso, puede reutilizarlo en distintos formatos, sobre todo en listas de control.
Para los nuevos clientes, por ejemplo, quiere que los usuarios lleguen al punto de activación y se den cuenta del valor de su producto lo antes posible.
Para ello, puede transformar un PNT en listas de control de incorporación para guiar a los clientes a través de las funciones principales de su producto y hacer que un proceso complejo parezca más sencillo con pasos más pequeños.
Consejo profesional: Una buena práctica de diseño UX es añadir una barra de progreso y tareas ficticias (pasos ya tachados) para que el usuario sienta que ha progresado. Funciona porque -según el efecto Zeigarnik- nuestro cerebro recuerda las tareas inacabadas, lo que nos da una mayor motivación para terminar algo que ya hemos empezado.
Consejos para crear guías paso a paso eficaces
Una vez que empiece a publicar y utilizar guías en su empresa, aún quedan algunos consejos que pueden marcar la diferencia entre una guía que se lee y otra que se sigue.
Utilizar recorridos interactivos en los que los usuarios aprendan haciendo
Product tours are interactive in-app experiences, typically consisting of sequences of tooltips and guided actions, that guide the user through the steps they need to take to complete key tasks within the product.
The interesting thing is that each new step is triggered when the user completes the previous one. Information about the user isn’t arbitrarily dumped before they need it.
From the user’s perspective, it’s a friendly, one-on-one chat.
Insert your step-by-step guides into your resource center
Make your guides visible and easily accessible so your users can always refer back to them.
To do this, create an application resource center user and embed all your self-service resources into it .
In addition to guides, you can also add a feedback widget to your knowledge base to enable passive feedback , and give them access to live chat and educational webinars in case the guides aren’t enough to help them.
Maintain a well-structured and easy-to-navigate guide
It’s easy to publish a lot of guides and forget to organize them.
The result is a resource center that is cluttered and difficult for users to navigate.
To do this, it’s important to organize your resources and create a structure for your guides (especially if they’re long).
You can do this in many ways, such as adding a table of contents within your guide or grouping multiple guides together to create a complete tour.
Asana, for example, does a pretty good job of adding all the tips mentioned above and making it easy for users to navigate and quickly jump to the information they’re looking for without having to read the entire guide.
Using AI to generate and embed videos in app guides
We are living in an era where artificial intelligence is being leveraged to create interactive video guides simply by typing text.
With an AI-powered video creation tool like Synthesia, you can generate video tutorials and quickly turn product guides into videos.
Plus, if you want to take things to the next level, Synthesia integrates with Userpilot (a customer success tool), allowing you to embed automated video tutorials within your UI templates (tooltips, checklists, etc.) to educate customers.
Offer guidance in multiple languages
As an international SaaS company, you likely have customers all over the world.
Entonces, ¿por qué no crear guías de productos para ellos en sus lenguas locales y facilitarles la lectura y comprensión de las instrucciones?
Traducir toda la información a varios idiomas puede parecer un proceso agotador, pero la localización merece la pena. Además, ¡hay muchas herramientas que pueden ayudarte a automatizar esto y a escalar!
Con una herramienta como Userpilot, puede traducir automáticamente el contenido de su base de conocimientos a más de 32 idiomas. Además, puedes traducir tus experiencias en la aplicación a varios idiomas.
Recoge las opiniones de tus alumnos y mejora tus guías
La práctica más olvidada es obtener información de las personas que leen la documentación. Este tipo de comentarios pueden aportarle ideas más profundas sobre cómo crear mejores guías en el futuro y facilitar la vida a sus usuarios.
Mida la eficacia de sus guías recopilando datos de los alumnos. Puede utilizar estos datos para identificar las guías que necesitan mejoras porque los alumnos las calificaron de poco útiles. Después, con la ayuda de los expertos, puede revisar y mejorar estas guías.
Actualice periódicamente sus instrucciones
Mantenga la documentación actualizada a medida que cambien los flujos de trabajo, las funciones y las directrices. En lugar de luchar con instrucciones obsoletas, los lectores pueden seguir las nuevas y realizar su trabajo sin fricciones.
Herramientas para crear guías paso a paso
Crear, reutilizar y organizar recursos puede llevar mucho tiempo.
Afortunadamente, hay algunas herramientas útiles que puedes utilizar para facilitar este proceso (y no se llaman Microsoft Word):
Userpilot
Userpilot es una herramienta de éxito del cliente para la creación de guías dentro de la aplicación utilizando varios patrones de interfaz de usuario dentro de su producto, tales como listas de control, información sobre herramientas, modales, etc.
Resulta útil cuando se desea convertir una guía del usuario en una lista de comprobación o un recorrido interactivo, de modo que los usuarios puedan recibir la formación que necesitan directamente en la aplicación sin tener que consultar una pestaña adicional.
No sólo eso, sino que también permite crear una base de conocimientos in-app y mostrar contenidos personalizados en función del segmento de usuarios. Además, le ofrece la posibilidad de traducir automáticamente sus recursos a más de 32 idiomas.
Escribano
Si necesita una herramienta para crear los recursos reales, Scribe es la herramienta que está buscando.
With Scribe, you can record your screen while you’re performing a task, and once you’re done, it will show you all the steps with annotated screenshots, neat handwriting, and click marks.
For dedicated tasks, you can easily ask someone on your team to record the video and send you the Scribe draft, so you only have to edit it and add details, customize it for your brand, link to other resources, etc.
Guides can be shared with a link or exported to other formats.
Loom
Loom is a must-have app for creating video tutorials and quickly complementing your guides.
The tool can simultaneously record your screen and camera, making it easy to walk through any process, provide on-the-fly feedback, collaborate, and improve the onboarding experience.
Loom also lets you organize your videos, add comments, and edit them as you finish recording, so you don’t need to use video editing tools for basic formats.
Conclusion
There’s no doubt that documenting your processes is necessary if you want your business to run smoothly.
So if you’re interested in leveraging interactive step-by-step guides in your business, request a Userpilot demo to get the most out of your investment.
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