Written by
Dorina Anton
, Marketing Specialist
Planning to do a revamp to your external knowledge base and provide your customers with greater value? Or just looking for inspiration for the next year? One thing we can tell you for sure: your knowledge base is an essential touchpoint with current and potentially new clients, and it should make your audiences' quest in finding answers as easy as possible.
For the last almost 20 years, our team has been working diligently to build innovative features that help people and organizations find the right information fast. Here are a few examples of successful knowledge bases we have built for the different clients to enable better and easier collaboration that you can draw inspiration from:
- DE FACTO, ADMO, and BROD hubs. We developed and implemented a cohesive solution for fact-checking information, enrichment of said fact checks with structured metadata, while providing a faceted search feature, and web mining tools for tracking how information is spread.
- Lenovo, for which we facilitated collaboration for over 7000 users by migrating to a custom knowledge base in under 30 days.
- HLS (The Historical Dictionary of Switzerland), for which we implemented a solution allowing publishers to create, edit and publish articles in 3 different languages while offering powerful search and indexing capabilities.
Ready to be inspired by our hand-picked knowledge base examples for 2024?
- Penpot
- Signal
- Obsidian
- OpenProject
- BBC
- Goodreads
- Zendesk
- Asana
- WooCommerce
- Udemy
- A bonus from our side: CryptPad
Penpot
When you want to represent your brand through your Help center, you definitely can draw inspiration from Penpot and their beautiful design sprinkled throughout their external knowledge base. Browsing through their resources is a joy especially when you try to use their dynamic search bar (which loads superfast). And because their product is open source, they're keeping the open-source values alive (collaboration, anyone?) with their call-to-action “Collaborate at GitHub” and “Edit this page in GitHub”. Last but not least, I'm a visual learner and understand best when I see a video or GIF that shows a feature and Penpot did a great job including plenty of such visual resources in their Help center. 💓
Signal
If your product aims to be simple and effective, then Signal is certainly the app to check out, with a knowledge base that follows the design of the product. It's on brand, it's minimalistic, and easy to navigate. Their recently viewed articles and related articles are a nice touch when navigating for answers, and their breadcrumbs help users know where they are. Last but not least, they once more prove to be very helpful with their “Submit a request” present at the end of each article which helps a user easily reach the team with further questions. 💭
Obsidian
I love when a company shows me how a product works through their knowledge base. Two features stood out immediately (and made me admire their smart way of marketing their product through their help center): a light and dark switch button, and an interactive graph that shows you where you are in their knowledge base. This also helps users understand the product. Extra points for having the knowledge base available in multiple languages. Also, their Search is dynamic and brings answers in a nicely structured manner. 👌
OpenProject
One thing that stood out when navigating OpenProject's FAQ center was the bottom section from each page that contains a space for feedback, edits, posting on the forum, suggestions for improvements, product feedback. I definitely loved the collaboration open-source value embedded into their Help Center, besides their beautiful visuals. 👏
BBC
It is always refreshing to see websites that make accessibility one of their objectives when building their website or help centers. This is especially important because 1 in 6 people have some sort of disability, which given the current population would mean around one billion people or 16% of the world's population. Also, 90% of websites are inaccessible to people with disabilities who rely on assistive technology and only 3% of the web is accessible to people with disabilities. To be frank, it's shocking to see websites still lacking in this area. But BBC's knowledge base example totally made my day. Also, their section at the bottom with “Accessibility Help” just confirms that indeed, all their audiences are important and worth catering news to. Bonus points for the “Popular Questions” on the knowledge base main page and the “Related questions” in each article. 🤩
Goodreads
I always enjoy a good book recommendation, so Goodreads is one of my go-to websites for this. For this article though, I wanted to discover their knowledge base resources, and I was not disappointed. The old book feel library vibe is chef's kiss. Besides enjoying their knowledge base visually, I appreciated how the Goodreads team created a very inspired blend of features: getting started section with FAQs, forum included in their help center, and recent announcements section. 📖
Zendesk
If there's one thing I instantly loved about Zendesk's knowledge base is their segmentation: per solution, per user groups, and per categories of questions. Their modular approach to categorizing all the information is excellent and an inspiration you can draw on. Not to mention their beautiful insertion of branded visuals. Bonus points for also including buttons to the community, “Start a free trial”, and “View demo”. 💯
Asana
This is another knowledge base inspiration, with a splendid modular approach that delivers a lot of information in a structured manner. Besides this, Asana decided to do something that is pretty underrated usually — learning by seeing. Their team did a great job in providing short, comprehensive videos about how to use their product. 📽
WooCommerce
Speaking of visually appealing knowledge bases, WooCommerce definitely wooed me when I first got to it — structured, concise, beautiful, on brand, and segmented content. I also find it really smart to have the “Log in” and “Get started” visible regardless of what knowledge base page you reached. This allows a user to quickly start their e-commerce journey. 🏆
Udemy
Udemy is a great example of catering content to your audience's needs, be it learners, or instructors, with content changing according to the visitor's objective. They also make their external knowledge base easy to explore with category of topics, content tables, breadcrumbs, links to additional resources, contact us button available on each topic's page, and even related articles about the topic. It's a simple, clear, clean knowledge base that covers all topics a visitor might be interested in! Also, their search bar is pretty neat and the results are organized in the same structure: students/learners and instructor topics. And the last thing that totally knocked me off my feet when I checked their Help Center: when clicking on the “Contact us” button in articles a form brings forth information displayed dynamically depending on what profile or topic you are interested in receiving answers. Totally worth checking that out! 😍
A bonus from our side: CryptPad
I don't mean to brag, but I can't stop admiring CryptPad's simple, yet very on brand design of the knowledge base. It's also well-structured, with folders within folders that make the information easier to break down and read. Last but not least: it's multilingual which is a great best practice since not everyone uses English or navigates content in a foreign language easily. Since it's a real-time document editing and collaboration product, it only makes sense to be as accessible as possible to audiences from across the globe and not let language be a barrier. 🗺
In lieu of conclusions, here are some key takeaways:
- Know who your audiences are and plan content for each.
- Build the knowledge base with accessibility in mind.
- Make content easy to skim and navigate from anywhere in the knowledge base.
- Charm visually as well and provide resources for various types of learners.
- The external knowledge base should reflect your product, whether it's on a productivity software, design product, or human resources services.
- Offer the option to be contacted in case not all questions are answered.
- Make the knowledge base mobile-friendly as well.
