Shaley’s UX Writing and Content Design Portfolio

A Process-Flow Diagram for a Custom Knowledge Base

The Challenge

Pages of requirements for a knowledge base being developed were proving too complicated to be useful. Conversations among stakeholders were circular and frustrating.

The Solution

I created a comprehensive graphic that showed the content flow based on project requirements so that people could point at things and discuss them to reach consensus and make progress on the project. Having process flow visuals made it possible to:

• Onboard employees to the project and get them up to speed faster
• Identify and understand individual roles and responsibilities
• Recognize existing limitations, eliminate redundancies, and plan for future capabilities

Goals for the Knowledge Base

It was critical that everyone on the team clearly understood how the knowledge base was being designed, since expectations were high.

• It would act as a repository of information that was collaboratively collected, organized, shared, searched, and used.
• Ideally, it would reduce support calls by providing an easy to use self-service experience for customers.
• It would be used as a resource for both customers and support representatives.
• It needed to offer options for both people who preferred to search and those who preferred to follow navigate using labels.
• It would house product and service articles, answers to frequently asked questions, detailed procedures and tutorials, video and images to help visual learners, and links to useful resources.

The end result needed to:

• Have a clear purpose and goal
• Easily and effectively provide the knowledge that is intended to be delivered
• Include a back-end database and a friendly front-end user interface
• Have an administrative interface that helped automate content capture and integration
• Include solutions for organizing, planning, and monitoring workflow
• Help manage content life-cycle
• Provide an easy way to categorize related content
• Allow for document storage and multimedia integration