Your help centre is a statement about the product in general. Almost every question a stuck person actually has is about their own account, on their own plan, at this moment. This page is about the gap between those two, and why writing more pages has never closed it.
The questions people actually arrive with. Two are reference questions and a page answers them perfectly. The other six are about one account at one moment.
“Where is this in my account?”
Depends on your plan, your role, and what your admin hid.
no page can hold this“Why is this greyed out?”
The page describing the control has no idea it is disabled for you.
no page can hold this“Did we turn this off, or do we not have it?”
Two different answers, one screen, and only your workspace knows which.
no page can hold this“Which of these two should I use?”
A judgement about your situation, not a description of two features.
no page can hold this“It worked yesterday.”
Nothing written before yesterday can address this.
no page can hold this“What does this error mean for our data?”
The consequence, not the message. Nobody documents consequences.
no page can hold this“What does this field do?”
A reference question. A written page is the best possible answer.
a page answers this“How do I export a report?”
Documentable — right up until the reader is on a plan where the button is elsewhere.
a page answers thisEvery one of the six needs to know something about the reader that no document has ever been able to contain — which account, which plan, which screen, which version, and what they did ten seconds ago.
Not a quality problem. A document is one statement served to everybody, and each of these needs a different statement per reader.
“Settings → Billing” is true of the product and false of half the accounts using it. Plans move things, roles hide things, and admins rename things. A page cannot check.
The same screen shows four different sets of controls depending on the seat. Documentation has to pick one and write for it, and it picks the one the author has.
A sentence about a rename is wrong the day the rename ships and stays wrong until somebody notices. Nothing in a help centre knows it has gone stale.
A help centre article does not get worse loudly. It keeps answering with exactly the same confidence it had on the day it was right.
the field it names is renamed
the step it describes is now two steps
the button moves behind a plan gate
Amvio walks the product again rather than trusting what it was told last time, so the answer moves when the product moves. That is not a better writing process. It is a different source.
This is not an argument for deleting documentation, and a page that made one would be wrong. Three things a written reference is genuinely better at — and one thing you get back.
Somebody evaluating your product, or learning it properly on a Sunday, wants a document — start to finish, at their pace, with nothing asking them a question.
A URL your team can paste into a ticket, a contract, or a security questionnaire. A conversation is not a citation.
Legal, security and support all need to agree on one wording before it goes anywhere near a customer. That is a document's job and always will be.
The questions it had to work out for itself are the pages your help centre is missing, listed — so the writing you do next is the writing somebody needed.
Your docs become one of the things it knows rather than a place it sends people. The reader stops being handed a page to go and read, and the page stops being the only thing you had to offer them.
Three capabilities behind the sentence at the top of this page, each of which is a page of its own.
Every screen, every control, every flow — including the behaviour nobody has written a page about, because it found it by using the software rather than by reading about it.
read the page →Not pages it searches. A single fact inside a long document can be found and used on its own, which is the difference between citing a page and answering a question.
read the page →What this company struggled with before, what they never came back to, what they were told. So “where is this” has an answer that is about their account and not the average one.
read the page →Amvio has no production numbers to show you and will not invent any. What it has is three tests you can run on the documentation you already have.
Count how many have an answer that is already written somewhere. Then count how many of those the person could plausibly have found. The second number is the one that matters.
Different plan, different role. If the answer does not change, nothing in the system knows which account it is talking to.
Every product has some. Retrieval cannot reach it by definition — so this is the fastest way to find out whether anything actually walked your software.
Every help centre has two or three of them. They are almost never badly written — they are answering a question about the product when the reader asked one about their account.
You arrived with one frame. The person you have to convince next is holding a different one.
all four, in one page →Deflection counts the people who gave up. Every design decision in a bot follows from the one number it is paid on.
read the comparison →It fires on your calendar and cannot watch. Nobody is stuck on day one — they are stuck on day forty.
read the comparison →The honest one, and the strongest. A person is better than this at four things. They are also asleep, ramping, and outnumbered.
read the comparison →Your users are already having the conversation. Right now it is with nobody.