Ian Landsman is Starting From Scratch, February 5, 2008:
HelpSpot End User Manual Soft Launch
If you're in the market for a powerful and user friendly Help Desk solution, please take a look at my company's flagship product HelpSpot.
I’m happy, proud, and relieved to announce the availability of the HelpSpot End Users Manual. The manual covers the features end users use on a daily basis (so everything except the Admin and Reports). While we’ve always had some documentation on the features, we’ve never had a complete guide to all the systems features (amazing isn’t it!). This manual fills that gap and covers the current 2.1.1 release.
What I really like about the manual is that it’s not so much click this click that click this, but focuses more on describing features, advice on how to use the most important features and general guidance. With Helpspot we don’t have much trouble getting people to understand the interface, the biggest challenge is getting them to understand how to apply the features to their help desk environment and see how they can improve their efficiency. I think this manual will go a long way in improving our customers experience with HelpSpot.
We hope to roll this out later this week or next week, but I thought I’d post it here first so it could get a little testing. So if you’re a HelpSpot customer or just an interested party I’d appreciate if you could download it and just make sure it opens for you, the fonts look right, etc. I know one person had a problem with the fonts, but we haven’t been able to replicate that yet so your help is appreciated!
I’m working on getting setup with an on demand printer so that we can offer full color printed versions as well. That should be ready in a week or two so if you’d like to order print copies that will be possible shortly.
I’d really like to thank Jamie who wrote the entire manual. Without her persistence this never would have gotten done. I’d also like to thank Mike Rohde who did the cover design and some of the interior design and Working with Words who did the proofreading.
Download the HelpSpot End Users Manual (pdf)
Discussion
Wow... 3.8MB makes for a pretty big manual, but the screenshots help to add context, so it's good.
I'm not sure about printing the default admin password unless it *must* be changed upon first login... but I guess you can judge if this is a risk or not.
Overall I think the format is great and everything is very clear. The user manual can also be seen as marketing material for those who have not yet purchased HelpSpot.
Great job!
Created by Alex Williams on 02.05.2008 10:42 pm
Hi Ian,
Why did you decide to go this route over making video tutorials, or web pages that try to accomplish the same goal?
-michael.
Created by Michael Sica on 02.06.2008 1:24 pm
Thanks Alex!
We may do some videos at some point, but I don't think videos replace manuals (though I understand some people seem to thing so). We deal with lots of corporate customers that like documentation of the product, if I handed them 5 videos and called it documentation they probably wouldn't buy that 
Also, people want to use this as the basis for training materials, etc and again that's hard to do with videos.
Making it into a web page is on the list. We did it first as Word/PDF because we want to offer a print version and it's impossible to make a web page look nice in print so we have to work in this direction. Word 2008 does a pretty good job of exporting to HTML so I'm hopefully that it won't be too bad to make a web page version down the road.
Created by Ian on 02.06.2008 4:25 pm
I’m happy and very glad to read this news about HelpSpot End User Manual!
Created by Baraba on 02.07.2008 2:48 am
I'm getting a 404 Not Found error when I click the PDF link.
Created by Mark R. on 02.08.2008 5:17 pm
Sorry, fixed!
Created by Ian on 02.09.2008 12:44 am