Ask HN: Best examples of end-user facing documentation

28 points·simonw··8 comments

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.

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Some docs that I think are good:

- https://www.sketch.com/docs/

- https://www.notion.so/help

- https://www.pixelmator.com/support/guide/pixelmator-pro/

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

Stripe

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