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Creating the user manual

Company - Loop

A glance at the final product

Stage 1: Setting expectations and strategy

Project task

I was asked to edit and rewrite a user manual for Loop’s user-facing product. This would be a living document that explained how logistics teams can operate to their fullest potential using Loop’s application.

Project goal

Strategy

Answer these questions during research and build the outline of the user manual through these questions: 

  1. Who is using this user manual and why? What are the features that the user will care about?
  2. What part of the product is the most convoluted? What portion of the product will appear in a regular workflow?
  3. What features do we want to highlight to the user that isn’t intuitive? What features do we want to encourage the users to use?
  4. Are there intuitive things that we should define such as the search function?
Click on the image for a link to the previous user manual

Stage 2: Research

Research objectives: 

  1. Understand the most common workflow within the product by going through why a user would use each section and extracting the most meaningful interactions to base the user manual on
  2. Create user personas that would interact with the product, understanding the different contexts and objectives that will engage with the workflow in the UI
  3. Know where Loop wants the user to do most of their work or which area of the product Loop wants the user to pay attention to and why

Research

I engaged with customer success and the product team to grasp what the application will be like for the user.

Source of research:

1. Customer success team

Why? Customer success is in charge of conducting demos and working directly with existing users about the product. They answered questions on user workflow and explained in demos how to better customize the product to best suit user needs.

2. Product design team

Why? The design team understands what priorities users have with the product and the objectives they hope to gain from the UI journey. The design team's goals were to create a clear and concise UX to guide users and bring efficiency to their pre-existing workflow.

3. User feedback meetings

Loop held Q&As or User Accessibility Testing so that potential and existing users could comment or question things about the product’s interface. This would indicate...

- what part of the product they would interact with
- what would change their previous workflows
- what to ignore or consider irrelevant
- what they would struggle with because the product’s UI isn’t clear or intuitive

Findings

On a daily basis, users would engage with invoice audit management, data organization, and payment scheduling in the product.

Stage 3: Execution

Creating the top-down structure for the user manual

Outlining

Knowing that users will engage with the product solely for invoice auditing, flow, and invoice payment, the research findings inspired several general questions from the user— considering the possibility that one could get stuck at every pitstop for an invoice to go from uploaded to paid.

Here is how we laid out the outline:

Click on the image to view the document.
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With this outline, I created sections based on what type of question I had and added pictures of the product when necessary for demonstration or visualization.