Why Your Help Site Should Be More Like SoundCloud

And less like a graveyard for PDF files

"Pioneers don't always blaze new trails; sometimes, they borrow existing maps and navigate them in innovative ways." - Simon Sinek

As tech writers and information developers, we don't have to invent new approaches from scratch. We can borrow good ideas and helpful techniques from others and use them to enhance, augment, and improve our support experiences.

In this post, I discuss why we might borrow ideas from my favorite music-sharing website, SoundCloud.

SoundCloud is an #audio distribution platform and music-sharing platform. It allows users to upload, promote, monetize, and share audio and listen to tracks from other users. It's home for my alter-alter ego — The Audio Wrangler — the persona I use when creating dance music remixes for my fans or sharing recordings of me DJ'ing live events.

SoundCloud has several features that tech doc teams should consider mimicking.

Following topics or experts: SoundCloud users follow their favorite artists, like and repost tracks, and comment on specific song parts. These features aid in the creation of individualized experiences. From these interactions, SoundCloud collects data to recommend relevant content and introduce members to musicians and types of music they may be unaware of. 

We could borrow this approach from SoundCloud and allow our visitors to follow specific topics, products, writers, or other experts on help sites. This would help users stay updated on issues they are interested in or frequently encounter. The data about these interactions can help inform decisions about future functionality and site experience improvements.

Our help sites should also allow users to like and share topics or support threads. These features can make it easy for visitors to distribute information to others while also helping us better understand which content our users appreciate.

SoundCloud users can comment on particular parts of a track. Similarly, users of help sites could be empowered to comment on specific aspects of a help article or thread, sparking detailed discussions and providing us with data needed to improve our existing customer experience.

Personalized recommendations: SoundCloud uses data to recommend relevant content. Support sites could do the same, using data from user interactions to suggest articles or threads that might be helpful. This can make the site more engaging and efficient for users.

Discovering content: Just as SoundCloud introduces users to new music, support sites could introduce visitors to helpful content they were unaware of, improving their knowledge and problem-solving ability.

What other features should we consider adding to technical documentation-powered help sites?