HACKER Q&A
📣 simonw

Best examples of end-user facing documentation


What are the best examples you've seen of end-user facing documentation for web applications?

I'm talking about the kind of thing you might see in a "knowledge base" or support website - not developer documentation.


  👤 vladstudio Accepted Answer ✓

👤 rozenmd
It's kind of a knowledge base for developers (since my customers run their own software products), but I get frequent compliments for my project's documentation: https://onlineornot.com/docs/welcome

👤 qzx_pierri
COTS applications always have awful documentation. I suspect it’s because companies want to sell you a support contract.

As someone who grew up reading Linux documentation (such as the Arch wiki), there’s no reason why paid products should have such an unintuitive and terrible “knowledge base”.

I literally can’t think of an example.


👤 cpach
I have a hard time to even come up with an example. Many web apps skip documentation and just use a help forum instead.

Google Workspace has quite good docs, but not really stellar.


👤 sandruso
You always start with a search. You want something, you know what you want to find. I think the structure is important for discovery ie API docs. Knowledge bases often lack content that’s why stack* sites exist.

You can check apple support, its multi-step process where in each step they ask you a question which narrows down possible issues. I think this is foolproof for problem diagnostics.


👤 pedalpete
Xero has a pretty large and I'd say half-decent user documentation. You can usually find out how to do whatever you need. But if they had focused more on their UX that would be even better.

👤 joshxyz
None. maybe its just my perspective but my end users dont really read.

👤 factorialboy
Stripe