Help articles at Code42 Software

A few small changes led to a reduced cognitive load for all of our users.

Background:

At Code42 we maintained over 1,600 help articles, which were used by corporate IT experts, small business owners, and home users (a wide variety of abilities) to run their admin console and the devices on their account. Some users were native English speakers, but many were not.

Problem:

The help article titles and headlines started with gerunds (verbs that end in -ing), which can be ambiguous and unclear. Our analytics also showed us that most users’ search queries use a “how to/how do I” format, which use simple verbs.

In addition, the help article titles and headlines used Every Word Capitalized, which makes reading more difficult.

Solution:

After researching best practices and validating our assumptions, I led a project to manually update all 1,600 help articles. We changed all of the gerunds to simple verbs, and we switched all of the titles and headlines from Every Word Capitalized to sentence case.

Examples:

Before: “Creating A New Archive Key Password”
After: “Create a new archive key password”

Before: “Deleting Files From Your Backup Archive”
After: “Delete files from your backup archive”

Before: “Signing Out Of The Backup Agent”
After: “Sign out of the backup agent”

Result:

Improved clarity, readability, findability, and scannability for everyone — from expert to novice, for native English speakers and international users alike.

And in stressful situations like backup console administration, every little bit helps.