Hi Pat,
Access help, just like the other Office applications, has separations of ownership based on different areas. All developer focused content that is part of the VBE window is hosted on MSDN and owned by the Dev Docs team. I don’t have any control over that content. Our MAX group owns and oversees end user focused content (content that comes up in the Help viewer/pane), admin focused content (think setup, install, etc.), video training, and templates. My specific team oversees just the end user content for Access, Excel, OneNote, Visio, Publisher, InfoPath, Microsoft Forms, Sway, Office Lens, and Docs.com. This content lives on support.office.com and is visible on the web and within the help viewer/pane.
To your question of, “Does anyone actually read the comments left with the help entries,” yes we definitely look at comments on our help articles. There are over 1,140 help articles in my Access landscape and we got over 2,400 comments on that content just in September alone. Due to the sheer volume of comments, we tend to try and focus on themes that we see and of course try and just weed out the noise – there’s a lot of that.
My team has focused our Access content efforts on these areas:
1. Keeping up with new features coming out of the product team. The main entry point for seeing that is on our main ‘What’s new in Access 2016’ article:
https://support.office.com/article/76454345-f85d-47af-ace1-98a456cb3496
2. Bringing down context sensitive help (CSH) error rates.
3. Raising the overall SAT rating across the content set through continuous improvements.
4. Massive work on content consolidation and cleanup.
Comments are just one area we look at. We look at page views, SAT ratings, comments, search queries, null search queries, CSH errors and trends, referrers, video play rates, click through rates, locale specific issues, and other key data points. It’s a mountain of data to look at.
It may surprise you to hear our biggest problem with Access end user content (and our other Office apps content too) is that we have too much content. I’m serious. To be more precise, we have too much duplicated content. Here’s a classic example. Compare these three articles (one is for 2007, one is tagged for 2010, and the last is tagged for 2013 and 2016):
https://support.office.com/article/8465b89c-2ff2-4cc8-ba60-2cd8484667e8
https://support.office.com/article/d055f259-9655-49a5-a071-f08cae458310
https://support.office.com/article/aa10cbb3-1a0e-4f22-a07e-ccc448519e3c
They are nearly identical. Why do we need three separate articles for four versions when one that covers all four versions will work just fine? We have *hundreds* (literally) of examples like this. It completely muddies up search for our customers. A generic organic search in your search engine of choice will nearly always land you on the 2007 articles in these cases because they have the most search history. Try it. Type “Access make summary data easier to read by using a crosstab query” into a Google/Bing search and look what is the first entry – yep the 2007 article. Most users aren’t on 2007; they’re on the later versions so they land on the older one and get frustrated since that’s not their version and the steps could be different. Our data shows this is our biggest challenge.
So our big focus has been consolidating this content into what we call ‘evergreen’ content – content that spans multiple versions – and getting rid of the duplicates. In this way, we’re vastly improving search results to get customers to precisely what they need and comments/ratings, etc. aren’t spread out over multiple duplicate copies of content. Just this week I finished a massive five-week cleanup on all of our import, link, and export content. We had over a dozen duplicated articles. There is now one, and only one, article for each intent and they span multiple versions. The new landing page just went live with links off to all of this evergreen content:
https://support.office.com/article/08422593-42dd-4e73-bdf1-4c21fc3aa1b0
The ratings across the entire content set (33 articles) has already jumped over 10% and I just made these changes. We’ll continue to watch the data to see how the revised content performs.
Every month I send a detailed content report to the Access product team (and the main other products my team supports) showing what work we are doing and each report includes detailed Power BI dashboard content metrics. I also periodically share some of this content data with our Access MVPs in the private group. They’ve seen the vast improvements in the metrics too.
I’d be happy to continue the conversation if you’d like. Send me a private message first and then we’ll continue over email.
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Jeff Conrad - Access Junkie - MVP Alumnus
Senior Content Publishing Manager - Modern Assistance and Support Experience - Microsoft Corporation
Author - Microsoft Access 2013 Inside Out
Author - Microsoft Access 2010 Inside Out
Co-author - Microsoft Office Access 2007 Inside Out
Access 2007/2010/2013 Info:
http://www.AccessJunkie.com
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