Tips for Knowledge Article Titling

[janiceg]

This is the sixth in a series of suggested practices for creating knowledge base content.

Now that you've written your content, you want to make sure people can find it! Users searching for the answer to their problem are going to be looking for an article that matches the problem that has caused them to search. Try to think about the issue from the customer's point of view.

"I've Got This Pain..."

Users generally come to your knowledge base because they are experiencing a problem. They're going to search for the symptoms they're seeing and not for the cause of the issue. For example, they might come to a knowledge base because they can't connect to the Internet. The words they're likely to look for are "can't connect," "no connection," or something similar, and not "router is down" or "network not configured properly."

Symptoms Not Solutions

Make your titles descriptive and succinct. Provide the solution in the text of the article rather than incluidng it in the title. Users are searching for symptoms, not solutions. If they could solve the issue, they wouldn't have to come to you!

• Weak: Set the maximum number of workflow activities to avoid workflow getting cancelled due to reaching maximum number of activities

• Better: Workflow process does not complete

TMI

Unless the underlying technical cause of the issue is something that users can solve, it's not really relevant to their understanding of the problem or how to solve it. Don't provide the technical cause of the problem in the title.

• Weak: AMB initialization is broken

• Better: Connect messages not being sent

No Time Limit

Unless an issue is really specific to a version or release of your product, don't limit the usefulness of the article by putting that information in the title. Despite your best efforts at solving the problem right away, it might persist through more than the current product iteration and users on a later version who are experiencing the issue might skip a search result that doesn't appear to be relevant to their product version.

More Tips for Authoring Knowledge Base Content

For more tips on creating good KB content, see:

• Six Tips for Useful URLs in Your Knowledge Base Articles 
• Tips for writing Steps to Reproduce and procedures
• 10 tips to make sure your Attachments and Screenshots are relevant and useful
• 8 Tips to Help Improve Content in your Knowledge Base
• 3 Common Mistakes to Avoid When Creating Knowledge Base Content