What this article covers
Analysis of the results of the survey and the derived improvement actions.
Tools
MS Forms and Excel.
Actioning Your Users' Feedback
Now that we know the current status of our documentation better (See part 1) and we have gathered feedback from our users (See part 2), it is time to analyze the results of our survey. Based on that, we should then find out which improvement actions we can extract from it.
For this article, I'm providing some screenshots of the results of a real developer documentation survey.
Let the fun begin!
Analyzing the Results
To analyze the results of the our survey we will group the questions under the following categories:
- Awareness - Are users aware of your documentation?
- Frequency of use.
- Search and page access behavior - How our users search and access our documentation pages.
- Page design - Does our page design meet the needs of our users?
- Next steps (According to our users).
- General perception.
- Other comments.
Grouping our questions helps us to identify the type of issues impacting our documentation and the domain of the solution to implement.
Results Categories
The following table shows the screenshots of the survey results, for each category, and some quick thoughts about them:
| Category | Results | Quick Thoughts |
|---|---|---|
| Awareness |  |
Our documentation is known but there is still space to reach more readers/users. |
| Frequency of use |  |
Our documentation is being used. Yay! |
| Search and page access behavior |  |
If a great number of users do CTRL+F to find content on a page, we should review our page design to ensure we are supporting that behaviour. |
| Page design |  |
Even if the majority of our users prefer the content being gradually reveal, a great deal of our users prefer the content being shown all at once. Let's find a balance! |
|
Next steps (According to our users) |
 |
Keeping our documentation up-to-date requires finding a cross-team collaboration strategy to involve all the required Subject Matter Experts (SME). |
| General perception |  |
Our documentation is perceive as useful. What about opening the door more more content? |
What to Do Next?
To decide what to do next keep in mind the current state and the needs (priorities) of our users. From this perspective, you can identify which improvement actions will have the highest impact on your users more accurately.
Once you have done that, plan accordingly.
When evaluating the current state of our documentation, you may target some hot potatoes. In this case, do some firefighting first and reduce the biggest pain.
If we don't have any firefighting to do, talk to your manager roles (Product Owner, Scrum Master, Lead Link, etc) or your customer/user insights roles/team to:
- Share the survey results.
- Explain and discuss your ideas.
- Know their thoughts and perspective.
Involving management and customer/user insights roles increases the awareness of your documentation project, and reinforces the following idea:
Improving product documentation impacts the adoption and ease of use and success of our product.
Planning the Improvement Actions
There is no magic formula to design an improvement plan. The following table provides, for each user survey topic group, some remarks to think about and a basic reference plan of action:
| Topic | Remarks | Reference Plan |
|---|---|---|
| Awareness and Frequency of Use | Increase the awareness on your documentation project and collaterally the frequency of use, requires involving management roles of different levels, either to enforce the awareness or to act as radiators of information. |
|
| Search Behaviour and Page Design | Once we know our users' behaviour when reading our documentation, we can support that behaviour and implement some changes to help them take the most of their time using our documentation. Both search behaviour and page design benefits from having a text formatting, page layout and visual elements guidelines. Having templates for each type of page also helps. |
|
| Keeping Our Documentation Up-to-Date | Keeping our documentation up to date is a tough and cross-teams task. Again, involving the management roles of your company is of great help. |
|
| General Perception | General perception depends on many topics. Some we can handle (transparency, support, content quality, etc), some we just can't (users not happy with their jobs, users prefer to use a different tool but are not allows, or just bad working habits). Remember to focus in those issues you can fixed. |
|
The End?
Documentation projects are, in most cases, living organisms. They are born, they grow, they interact with their environment, and adapt to new surrondings and demands. To keep our documentation alive and quicking (an our users satisfied!) communication is key.
Then iterate!
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