The Future of Documentation is Personalized

#documentation #contentwriting #ai #contentstrategy

Abstract

We live in a world where every consumer is looking for a personalized solution. The strategy for product documentation a couple of years ago emphasized keeping it generic so as to cater to at least 70% of the use cases. However, given how the traditional approach to documentation is undergoing a revolutionary transformation (thanks to how products and solutions are put to use in the most unique way in today’s dynamic realm of technology), it seems like The Future of Documentation is Personalized! But given the vast number of use cases with diverse needs, varying levels of expertise, and distinct preferences, how practical is tailoring content to meet the specific requirements and preferences of individual users? Can personalized documentation be both a practical and effective strategy?

A shopping cart approach to building custom documentation provides users a tailored experience that meets their unique needs. In this approach, users can curate their own documentation by selecting relevant topics just like adding items to a shopping cart. If powered with Artificial Intelligence (AI) and modular documentation techniques, the shopping cart approach can fulfill the diverse needs of documentation users in the ever-evolving technological landscape.

Introduction

In the fast-evolving landscape of technology and information management, tailoring services (personalization) seems to be a much needed significant shift in the strategy so that businesses can build stronger relationships and foster loyalty. How documentarians write documentation should also align with this era of customization and user-centric experiences. The evolution in documentation approach should not just be about recording information but tailoring it to the unique needs, preferences, and roles of individuals.

In this blog, I explore the idea of personalization in documentation with an example of a shopping cart approach and assess how AI and modular documentation concepts can be leveraged for on-the-fly documentation generation.

So what level of personalization is reasonable for a fantastic user experience? I know “fantastic user experience” is subjective, so for the sake of simplicity, let’s define the scope of this blog before delving deeply into how personalization can be achieved:

Catering to diverse levels of expertise
Being relevant to the user's context
Catering to varied learning styles and preferences
Being easily and quickly searchable
Avoiding information overload

Given the above requirements, if we can build a strategy to provide personalized documentation empowering users to find the information they need independently, it will improve their experience and so we can hope to have increased loyalty and advocacy in the readers.
And if the readers are able to generate custom documentation on-the-fly, the agility, adaptability, and efficiency that it would bring, will be an added advantage.

Let’s assess how to build a shopping cart experience for on-the-fly custom documentation generation.

Building Custom Documentation: A Shopping Cart Approach

Many of us appreciate the flexibility that a shopping cart approach offers in e-commerce practice. We can add required items to a virtual cart from a website and proceed to checkout to complete our purchase. From a user’s perspective, this approach offers advantages like browsing flexibility, purchase tracking and multi-product usage. From a seller’s perspective, this approach offers up-selling and cross-selling opportunities.

If we were to adopt a similar approach for documentation, the aim would be to achieve:

User-centric experience
Personalization and efficiency

The concept of a shopping cart for documentation can transform the traditional documentation interface into a user-centric interactive experience. If users can easily navigate a comprehensive catalog of documentation topics, cherry-pick the topics based on their requirements, organize and assemble them, and add them to a virtual cart, that kind of flexibility can contribute to a higher customer satisfaction. Each time they can create a customized document that aligns precisely with their interests and projects.

Key components for a shopping cart documentation approach

A robust catalog with documentation topics: The most important component to build a documentation shopping cart is the product itself. In this context, it is the documentation topics. Modular documentation is the process of creating content in reusable components, like concepts, procedures, and reference material. This allows the author to then group these components (modules) into cohesive process-based units. A strong foundation of modular documentation topics is paramount to implementing this approach.
A set of contextual metadata: To make the documentation topics easy to search and navigate, it is important to define and use contextual metadata such as category, technology, version, difficulty level etc. All the topics should be properly tagged using these metadata to form the core foundation for users to explore and select relevant content.
User profiles and authentication: Most company websites already provide authentication features for their subscribed customers, but some also offer access to documentation without login. A system enabling users to create accounts with personalized profiles can offer search and download history records and other features that need authentication.
Intuitive user interface: Keeping it simple is the key to a great user experience. Build a simple and intuitive interface enabling users to add, remove, organize and build documentation in their required format effortlessly.
Dynamic document preview generation: A preview feature that allows users to view the dynamic document in real time as they add, remove and organize their topics can empower users to visualize their document before finalizing it.
Multiple output options with a download feature: Provide multiple output formats (such as PDF, HTML) for your users to choose from and ensure they comply with your organization’s standard template. A documentation download feature enables offline usage and sharing.
Version control: It is important to implement a version control feature for the creation of documentation topics in order to manage changes easily. It also helps when multiple teams are collaborating and contributing to the documentation catalog, allowing them to track the history of edits.
Feedback mechanism: A feedback mechanism on the user interface can help users provide feedback and also rate the usefulness of the documentation topics. This feedback can feed into refining user recommendations as well.
Accessibility: Build a responsive web design that caters to the needs of a variety of users, including features that assist differently abled users and provides a consistent user experience across various devices, ensuring accessibility for all users.

Unleashing the Power of Modular AI-Driven Documentation

Now that we have discussed the user’s experience of personalized documentation via the shopping cart approach, let’s now delve into the author’s perspective.
In order to build a robust catalog of documentation topics, breaking down the information into smaller, self-contained modules or units of information is key. And on top of that, if authors can leverage AI to build AI-driven contextual understanding, it can empower them to cater to readers with diverse use cases very effectively. Not only will this provide authors efficiency, agility and adaptability but it will also prepare them to meet the constantly evolving demands of users by improving their workflows.

Integration of Modular Documentation and Artificial Intelligence

If the shopping cart experience is powered by improved content relevance and discoverability through AI, an author can achieve more adaptive, intelligent and user focussed documentation. This idea is not uncommon but there haven’t been many companies who have gone through this paradigm shift for their official product documentation and hence it is worth exploring for its benefits. Here are some ideas on how AI can be leveraged:

Implementing AI to develop personalization algorithms for generating tailored content based on user needs of preferred format, skill level, language, level of detail etc. This involves persona identification to a certain extent. Such algorithms can be built to analyze user data to identify patterns and preferences, for example user's skill level, language proficiency, output format preferences, desired level of detail etc. The algorithms can use this analysis for creating virtual personas representing predefined segments of the target user.
Implementing AI to assess user interaction and feedback that can feed into continuous improvement and optimization of the system.
Implementing AI to assess metadata to further improve personalization and customization experience.
Implementing Structured Data Markup annotation system, which can provide additional context about the content to search engines. Structured data markup such as Schema.org can be used to aid search engines to understand the content relevance and significance. This approach can help improve search results by improved ranking and visibility of the content.
Implementing AI to match user searches and feedback to similar existing feedbacks and providing a consolidated list of similar feedbacks to the authors. This falls under the category of predictive AI as it involves making predictions based on existing data patterns rather than generating entirely new content.
Implementing AI for analytics and monitoring. Such systems can monitor user behavior, track engagement, and gather useful insights.

Identifying Potential Risks and Risk Mitigations

As you assess and explore the idea of using a shopping cart concept leveraging AI to generate personalized documentation, it is important to understand potential risks involved and account for time, resources and budget to implement risk mitigation strategies. The following potential risks and respective risk mitigation ideas can help you make an informed decision before proceeding with your project:

There is always a risk involved concerning quality and accuracy when your AI system is new and still learning. Also, it takes time to generate an exhaustive and reliable data source. If your AI algorithms lack access to comprehensive and reliable data, it may lead to inconsistent or inaccurate content generation.
There are several ways to mitigate this risk while you build a comprehensive source of truth. You can put in place a meticulous quality check and review processes to validate the generated content. Implementing techniques for AI-powered content (leveraging Large language model (LLM), natural language processing (NLP) and natural language generation (NLG) algorithms) can also be considered for mitigating such risks. As the AI generated tools are limited to the training data that is fed to the model, consider using frameworks like Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) that work towards the aim of identifying content gaps instead of retrieving incorrect information for the users.
One of the risks concerning AI generated personalized documentation approaches is lack of trust and acceptance in users for such content. As mentioned in the previous point, it takes time to build a robust and reliable data set. Any inaccurate data generation experience can demotivate a user and deminish their trust on AI-generated content.
To mitigate this risk, consider providing transparency around how you are using your AI algorithms to generate personalized data for them. Additionally, highlight the benefits of using AI and also solicit users' feedback regularly on the generated content. This approach may go a long way in building trust and acceptance in your users.
It is important that you don't risk user privacy in your attempt to enhance the user experience of personalized content. AI-generated content has the potential to put your system at risk of privacy and security breaches, for example, by inadvertently exposing sensitive or confidential information.
To mitigate risks of privacy breaches and security vulnerabilities, perform regular audits for the generated content. You can also consider implementing robust security measures like data anonymization to protect user data. To protect data, it is essential to abide by all legal and regulatory measures and codes issued by organizations, governments, or authorizing bodies concerned.
Content generated using AI may lead to legal or compliance issues if they are not trained using ethically sourced data.
To mitigate the risk of legal issues, ensure you implement best practices concerning industry regulations and standards to prevent and detect legal issues like copyright infringement.

Conclusion

In order to deliver a personalized documentation experience, it seems necessary to use many different approaches in concert with one another. From the front-end experience to the 'behind the scenes' work that authors can implement to improve both the users' experience and their own efficiency and resource management, a holistic view is needed. Of the many tools, processes, and technological advancements available to documentarians, it is essential to choose a variety that balances user experience and increased ease of authoring. In addition, because of the speed of change in technology, authors and content strategists must not become entrenched in any one of the approaches discussed above, but rather maintain enough flexibility to incorporate new advancements into their tool chains and workflows, especially in the AI space.

In conclusion, the shopping cart approach is an intuitive and most importantly familiar framework that accelerates adoption and enhances user satisfaction. The convergence of such a user-centric design, AI technologies, and dynamic content delivery can reshape how we perceive and manage information. Given the risks involved in AI driven documentation versus the advantages of embracing this revolution, it is worth considering this approach to navigate the complexities of evolving demands of today’s digital users.