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If you're pitching a managed platform for documentation, then the documentation for the product itself has to look and behave brilliantly. It's the showcase for
by midenginedcoupe 4y ago
If you're pitching a managed platform for documentation, then the documentation for the product itself has to look and behave brilliantly. It's the showcase for your product. Unfortunately this doesn't seem to do that. The website seems to have a confused mix of styles and it quite hard to read somehow. Also, grammar is super-important in this domain - I see SaaS has already been picked up, but it's also super-weird to see the plural of Documentation being Documentations. Reading the terms and privacy is also hard work - there's lots more work on grammar required here, too.
The focus seems a bit blurred, too. The claim is that it's for Support, User Guides, Knowledge Bases, Documentation and Change Logs. But the features list also talks about multuple Blogs. It's not at all clear where they fit in.
Also, being misled is a massive turn-off. First you say
"User Guides + Knowledge Bases + Documentations + Changelogs",
but then caveat it with
"Currently offering User Guides only".
But then later on the same page you say
"Apps like Intercom, Crisp, and Helpscout, offer only one aspect of support pages and that is Knowledge Bases. Subsection covers all four: User Guides, Knowledge Bases, Documentations, and Changelogs"
You don't cover all four, you _plan_ to cover all four in the future.
- octobereleven 4y agoThank you so much for your well founded critique. I will take all your comments and improve these areas you have mentioned. Your feedback is gold!
- nicoburns 4y agoOne super-simple improvement would be to include a link to your documentation in the primary navigation of your website. I can't even find it!
- octobereleven 4y agoYou are absolutely right. It should be up there. It’s currently all the way down on the footer: https://subsection.io/guide https://subsection.io/guide It’s still being worked on as Subsection is only about a week old and still deploying features as we speak.
- zerkten 4y agoYou should flesh out your your own docs before showing it off. For the people that are buying documentation products they are comparing your product to many others including open source tools which come with substantially more evolved demonstrations of what they do. Throwing stuff over the fence works for some markets and is generally encouraged by HN, but it doesn't for a lot of markets which have substantially more money to spend on these kinds of solutions. In return for more money, you need to withstand basic scrutiny.
- octobereleven 4y agoYou are right. We need to move faster in that direction, as few other commenters have noted earlier. Thank you for taking a look at it.
- mijustin 4y agoI decided to try it out (I recorded my initial impressions here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MdmB0JnNF3s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MdmB0JnNF3s). The software itself is pretty slick. Currently we're using Crisp Chat's help docs for our SaaS, as well as a static site generator for our API docs. I think this could reasonably replace both. One thing I really like is the layout. Having general topics on the left, as well as anchor based menu in each article is super helpful.
- octobereleven 4y agoThank you so much for recording this. I appreciate it a ton. It’s incredible to look at it from the user’s perspective. And happy that you found it useful. Gives me a few ideas on how to improve certain things. And to compare it to Crisp, that’s just amazing. Would love to see Transistor’s help and api docs on Subsection at some point. This was great!