I recently wrote my first product guide in my position at Homesteaders Life Company for a brand new CRM instance called Ensight. Although the Ensight platform had been live for four months, sales leadership noticed uneven adoption despite training. I took on writing a product guide about Ensight for users to access complex information about the features and functionalities of this brand new CRM to supplement and reinforce the training they received.
Because the information inside the product guide is proprietary, I’ve only included three non-consecutive pages from the initial version I wrote (which totals 25 pages).
Why is a product guide important? As a UX designer who often works on complex, internal tooling, product guides are a secret weapon against poor adoption, bad habits, and misinformation. A product guide will improve the user experience even for users who receive training.
I also have a sneaky other reason for evangelizing the penning of product guides. The process of notating features and functionalities requires asking and writing down why something works the way that it works. If a product’s design hasn’t received that level of scrutiny yet, the process of writing a product guide is marvelous at capturing leadership intent. And then you’ve created opportunities to question if a product is operating as intended and iterate on design as needed.
