How To Create An In-App Resource Center (Examples)
- Published:
- Updated: July 10, 2024
Even with the most well-designed software and streamlined processes, users need guidance to resolve issues and learn new features. Whether the goal is to support your organization’s workforce or customer base, in-app support is becoming increasingly vital to help users engage with software applications.
With real-time, self-serve support, users can learn and resolve issues on their own terms without frustration or IT intervention. In-app resource centers are valuable tools for supporting employees and meeting customer expectations.
In this article, we’ll explain how to create a help center for your organization and provide examples of effective in-app resource centers that provide effective end-user support.
What Is an In-App Resource Center?
An in-app resource center is a database designed to provide users with on-demand access to support resources within an application’s UI. Information from your resource center can be presented to users as an in-window widget for contextual resources based on their in-app behavior or as an easy-to-find, searchable knowledge base.
Resource centers help support customers and employees as they navigate an application and serve as a repository for user documentation. Like knowledge bases and help centers, in-app resource centers contain educational content, from product information and feedback tools to FAQs and in-app tutorials—all designed to improve user experience and facilitate learning.
Benefits of an in-app resource center include:
- Better user experience: In-app resource centers help end-users avoid friction and enjoy interacting with your software application by facilitating learning and issue resolution.
- Enables users with self-service support: In-app resource centers empower users to resolve issues, learn on their own terms, seek out only the necessary information, and avoid information overload.
- Improves customer education: By providing in-depth, comprehensive information about your organization’s products and services, in-app resource centers promote brand trust and loyalty, highlight new features, increase user engagement, and enable customer training.
- Allows companies to monitor resource center usage: Teams can monitor how users interact with the resource center to gather insights to improve application features and support content creation continually.
What to Include in Your In-App Resource Center
An organization’s resource center’s effectiveness lies in its content’s effectiveness. Here are some of the most critical features to incorporate into your in-app resource center more valuable to users:
- Product technical documentation: To support software developers interacting with your application, fill your organization’s resource center with product documentation. This includes user guides, technical specifications, and API documentation (if applicable) – anything that explains how the application is built and operated.
- New feature and product update announcement: Keep end-users in the loop by promptly adding announcements about upcoming features and updates to your resource center. Complement announcements with applicable in-app guidance to provide users with vital support as changes are rolled out.
- Support articles and FAQs: Improve adoption by incorporating educational resources like step-by-step tutorials, community forums, and FAQs into your in-app resource center. Features like community forums can also facilitate community interaction as users learn how to make the most of your application and services.
- Video tutorials: Amplify messaging and supplement written materials with different types of media like video tutorials. Use them to accommodate users with different learning preferences, especially when it comes to more complicated tasks or explanations.
- Help desk function for submitting support requests: For more complex issues and questions, provide easy access to customer support contact information and direct forms for submitting requests and inquiries.
- User feedback options: Similarly, it’s important to include in-app feedback options for users to share their opinions, request features, or report bugs. These insights are critical for continual improvement and ensuring users feel valued and respected.
How to Create an In-App Resource Center With Whatfix Self Help
Whatfix is a digital adoption platform (DAP) that provides in-app guidance for effective user support and software adoption. Whatfix allows teams to aggregate support content into a centralized library and deliver that content to users as they interact within an application.
Here are some best practices we suggest for using Whatfix to build an ultra-effective in-app resource center for your organization:
1. Design your resource center to match your product’s brand with the no-code tool
Whatfix is highly customizable, allowing teams to build support features into applications that blend seamlessly with existing styles and branding. Whatfix’s no-code style editor makes it easy to create branded in-app support resources for your in-app resource center, down to the colors, fonts, and sizes of different features. The Self-Help widget appears as an intuitive, easily accessible tool, typically located at the side or bottom of your application interface.
2. Integrate your help desk, knowledge articles, videos, and more into your Self Help center
Once the structure is built, create and compile all the relevant resources to be uploaded into your resource center. Whatfix makes creating, integrating, and organizing all kinds of assets easy for optimal user experience. Use Whatfix analytics to determine the content needs of different users and steer your content creation, from which topics to focus on to the most appropriate media formats for your content. The widget can display a searchable, categorized list of resources, ensuring users can quickly find the help they need.
3. Prompt in-app guided experiences with Self Help entries
Whatfix in-app guidance provides users with support in the exact moment of need. Use Whatfix Self Help widgets to deliver personalized guidance and prompts for resource searches as users complete certain actions within the application. Interactive walkthroughs and step-by-step guides can help users complete tasks without leaving the app.
4. Create articles to drive awareness of product updates and new feature adoption
As your organization’s products and service offerings evolve, create new content to help users adopt new features and learn about the updates. Whatfix’s no-code content creation and AI authoring make it easy to quickly create new articles and other support resources so users never miss a beat. Embed multimedia content like videos and images to enhance the learning experience.
5. Drive customer education by promoting advanced features
Provide options for advanced support features like webinars and ambassador programs to promote in-depth customer understanding of your organization’s products. This encourages brand loyalty and improves customer experience as they develop an intimate knowledge of your organization’s products and services.
6. Enable users with Whatfix’s AI-powered search
Provide users with relevant, contextual, personalized guidance for optimal user experience with Whatfix’s AI-powered search queries. Embed an expandable help widget on the side of your window to allow users to search for the resources they need within the flow of work, boosting information discovery.
7. Collect feedback from users with embedded survey forms in your Self Help
Whatfix allows teams to embed surveys and other feedback tools into in-app self-help resources to gather important data about user experience. Depending on the context, these surveys can be programmed to appear as Full Sheets, Bottom Sheets, or Popups to maximize the likelihood that users will interact and provide feedback.
8. Monitor and analyze in-app resource center usage to identify support trends
Use Whatfix’s powerful data analytics to monitor and analyze trends in user support and topic preferences. From user journeys and event tracking to AI-powered insights, this data allows teams to take a data-driven approach to continually improving user experience. The analytics also provide insights into how often the Self-Help widget is used, what content is most accessed, and where users might be encountering difficulties.
4 Examples of Helpful In-App Resource Centers
Here are four examples of in-app resource centers that enable users with help when and where they need it.
1. Sophos
Sophos is a leading threat intelligence cybersecurity solution that used Whatfix to create Sophos Assistant and provide in-app guidance to its XG Firewall customers as they learn to use the software. Because Sophos customers are not often cybersecurity experts themselves, this in-app guidance is vital for ensuring firewalls function properly.
Sophos Assistant is an embedded resource center that lives within the web-admin console UI of its firewall product. Stocked with around 700 links to product-related content and paired with guided flows, this in-app resource center supports customers as they configure, deploy, and maintain firewalls.
This in-app knowledge base can be accessed within the flow of work so users can search for relevant support content and access necessary technical documentation.
In-app guided flows complement Self Help widgets by easing users through new processes step-by-step.
By ensuring relevant and personalized content based on activity data and user roles, Sophos Assistant has dramatically improved user adoption and reduced the submission of support tickets year over year. Sophos Assistant has saved the company thousands of hours in support-related time, amounting to nearly $4000 annually.
Read more about this Whatfix success story here!
2. Asana
Asana’s Help Center includes a wide variety of resources, including a search bar, video tutorials, navigation guides, and complete courses. In addition to providing more standard support documents, Asana offers in-depth support through live virtual training and a community forum.
Users can access the help center via a sidebar that includes a search tool, relevant video tutorials, and other support documents within the live application.
3. Airtable
Airtable is a cloud collaboration platform that helps organizations plan campaigns and manage projects. The Airtable Help Center includes a search tool and features educational resources in various formats, from templates and help articles to webinars and community support forums.
Within the application, Airtable uses a pop-up widget to steer users toward the Help button in the top navigation of the page. From there, the Help button triggers a sidebar that appears with a search bar and links to recommended topics and additional resources.
4. Slack
The workplace productivity platform Slack provides its customers with an extensive resource library to support users and promote brand loyalty. Slack’s resource library includes options to visit the help center, register for a webinar, and check out the Slack blog. It also lets users filter content based on industry and job role and takes things a step further with event registration for live education programming and certification programs.
Within the application, support messages appear within channels, and the Help Center can be accessed via the top navigation, prompting a new window with search tools and recommended content. Slack customers can also incorporate Modals, or pop-ups, which can be used to direct users to specific help resources within interactive Blocks.
Whatfix Self Help allows teams to embed their resource centers on any application to empower users of all types in their moment of need. With a no-code editor, in-app guidance, and AI-powered tools, your teams can build an effective support structure to deliver a positive user experience and reduce help desk costs. Whatfix Analytics tracks user behavior and activity to detect friction points, analyze role-based trends, and analyze user flows to help teams continually optimize applications and support content.
Leverage Whatfix to enable software adoption and create a comprehensive in-app resource center.
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