The new release guides are essential for communicating new features to users, as well as teaching them how to use these new features or incorporate changes into their workflow. Dozens, and sometimes nearly 200, guides are developed for each release, and many of them are duplicated to work in the application in different ways.
There’s a team of instructional designers who work with product owners to whittle down the content into the must-knows. A large group of them designed the content and handed it off to my team to develop into individual guides. We went through a lengthy and fast-paced process to work through the content, develop guides, document the outline, and obtain approvals from product owners, as well as legal, compliance, and privacy teams. This entire process was complex, but we developed a repeatable approach that was effective.
The new release guides contain the content of each new feature. These new release guides were activated in several different ways. One way is shown as an example here, an index guide that lists all new features and can be opened from the application help center, which is also a Pendo guide.
One of the most important features of the new release guides is the feedback mechanism. We collect a Yes/No question if they felt the guide was helpful, followed by an open-ended question. The open-ended question is a great way to collect direct feedback from users on the guides, as well as suggestions users have about the application itself.
