10 · Usage & ongoing use · Sentences that match the system
Help still describes a button that is gone
Content operations maintains help, notices, and document instructions so on-screen sentences match the current rules. He does not invent whether over-receive is allowed. Articles about old buttons must come down.
Receiving. Write what counts as success: there is a document number and status is received. Do not write “click and you are done.”
Over-receive. Write pending confirmation. Do not write “receive into stock first and backfill the document later.”
Version. The day a button is renamed or disappears, the old article comes down.
Content operations owns the sentences off the screen
Prompts inside the system are set by product and interaction. The help centre, notices, and print instructions are maintained by content operations. The one-page floor instruction is updated by the trainer by shift. This role does not replace training material. The mark of the role is that these sentences must match the current version. An old article is worse than none, because it teaches people to tap a button that no longer exists, and they think they have no privilege. He requires every article to bind to a function version. When a version is released, behaviour changes in the release notes must change the article the same day. If that cannot be done, take it down first. Do not leave the wrong one up.
He does not invent rules. Whether over-receive is allowed, the article can only restate the sentence in the requirements table. If the business wants to loosen it in a notice, he refuses and asks them to go through product. A notice is not a second set of rules. Wording matches the interface: if the system says “pending confirmation,” the article does not say “exception handling,” or search and training will not line up.
How to check whether an article can stay
Each month he samples high-read articles and taps through against the current page. Steps that cannot be tapped take the whole article down or rewrite it. Take-down needs a link to the replacement, so an old address in a bookmark does not become a blank. A blank makes people ask a colleague, and the colleague may remember an even older process.
Help for an old button
The receiving confirm button moved from top-right to a full row at the bottom. The help screenshot was still top-right. Night shift could not find it from the screenshot, called support, and it was logged as an operation problem. Content operations replaced the screenshot and the sentence on release day, and put one line in the notice about the position change. Support linked that operation problem to the old article and noted on close that the article had been updated. The next week the same problem did not return. Change only the system and not the article, and training and help will keep producing tickets.
Article change history is kept, so it is clear which day the sentence changed. On release day content operations taps through help against the new page. Only after that is the old article allowed to stay in search. If search hits the old article first, he demotes it or takes it down. The take-down note goes to support, so support does not still answer from the old article. When the answer and the page disagree, users believe the person, then work the books on the old process. Notices do not write empty words. System maintenance must say which document is affected, for how long, and whether to retry after recovery. “Some functions may be abnormal” makes warehouse clerks blame every failure on maintenance, including over-receive that should have gone to a supervisor. He lists high-read, low-complete articles separately. High read, low complete means people read it and still cannot do it. The article may be talking about concepts instead of actions. On rewrite he lands every step on words that actually exist on the screen. He does not abstract it as “enter the relevant module.”
Those four words, “relevant module,” are how a night-shift phone call starts. He changes article titles to actions, not function names. Warehouse clerks search “receiving rejected,” not “inbound management module.” File by function name, and even a full help centre cannot be found. Help that cannot be found is the same as not written. He points old addresses of taken-down articles at the current action, so bookmarks do not land empty. Empty once, and next time the user will not trust help and will ask a colleague. A colleague’s answer often stops on the old version.