What Search Logs Reveal About Technical Documentation Failures
The search box often notices documentation problems before anybody else does
A few years ago I asked a technical documentation manager what customers were struggling to find. She didn’t show me a dashboard. She opened a spreadsheet.
Near the top were searches for things like “reset password,” “export data,” “SSO,” “change email address,” and “talk to support.” Nobody in the room found the list particularly surprising. Support had heard the questions before and product managers knew which features generated the most complaints. The writers recognized several topics they had updated repeatedly.
What surprised me was how little of this information appeared anywhere else. The content audit didn’t mention it. The analytics reports didn’t mention it. The quarterly review didn’t mention it.
The search logs did.
What Do Search Logs Tell Tech Writers?
Page views tell us what people open. Support cases tell us which problems are expensive. Customer surveys tell us how people feel about the experience we provide.
Search logs show what people went looking for. They tell us what people were trying to accomplish when they stopped looking through menus, scanning headings, or clicking links and — finally — decided to ask for help.
One of the surprises in search data is how often people search for information that already exists. The customer searches for "login problems." The documentation discusses identity federation. Someone searches for "files aren't updating." The product team calls the feature workspace synchronization.
