Azure Communication Services technical documentation table of contents update

Technical documentation is like a map for using a platform—whether you're building services, solving problems, or learning new features, great documentation shows you the way to the solution you need. But what good is a map if it’s hard to read or confusing to follow? That’s why easy-to-navigate documentation is so important. It saves time, reduces frustration, and helps users focus on what they want to achieve.

Azure Communication Services is a powerful platform, and powerful platforms require great documentation for both new and experienced developers. Our customers tell us consistently that our docs are a crucial part of their experience of using our platform. Some studies suggest that documentation and samples are the most important elements of a great developer experience.

In this update, we’re excited to share how we’ve improved our technical documentation’s navigation to make it quicker and simpler than ever to find the information you need when you need it.

Why did we change?

In order for our content to be useful to you, it first needs to be findable. When we launched Azure Communication Services, the small number of articles on our site made it easy to navigate and find relevant content. As we’ve grown, though, our content became harder to find for users due to the quantity of articles they need to navigate.

To refresh your memory, the table of contents on our docs site used to be structured with these base categories:

• Overview
• Quickstart
• Tutorials
• Samples
• Concepts
• Resources
• References

These directory names describ

e the type of content they contain. This structure is a very useful model for products with a clearly-defined set of use cases, where typically a customer’s job-to-be-done is more constrained, but it breaks down when used for complex, powerful platforms that support a broad range of use cases in the way that Azure Communication Services does.

We tried a number of small-scale changes to address the problems people were having on our site, such as having certain directories default to open on page load, but as the site grew, we became concerned that our site navigation model was becoming confusing to users and having a negative impact on their experience with our product.

A screenshot of the old structure of our documentation site on initial load.

We decided to test that hypothesis and consider different structures that might serve our content and our customers better.

Our user research team interviewed 18 customers with varying levels of experience on our platform. The research uncovered several problems that customers were having with the way our docs navigation was structured. From confusing folder titles, to related topics being far away from each other in the nav model, to general confusion around what folder titles meant, to problems finding some of the most basic information about using our platform, and a host of other issues, our user research made it clear to us that we had a problem that we needed to fix for our users.

What did we change in this release?

To help address these issues, we made a few key changes to make our table of contents simpler and easier to navigate. The changes we made were strictly to site navigation, not page content, and they include:

We've restructured the root-level navigation to be focused on communication modality and feature type, rather than content type, to better model our customers' jobs-to-be-done. Topics include

1. All supported communication channels
2. Horizontal features that span more than one channel
3. Topics of special interest to our customers, like AI
4. Basic needs, like troubleshooting and support

This will allow customers to more easily find the content they need by focusing on the job they need to do, rather than on the content type.

1. We've simplified the overview and fundamentals sections to make the site less overwhelming on first load.
2. We've surfaced features that customers told us were difficult to find, such as UI Library, Teams interop, and Job router.
3. We've organized the content within each directory to roughly follow a beginner->expert path to make content more linear, and to make it easier for a user to find the next step in completing their task.
4. We've removed unnecessary layers in our nav, making content easier to find.
5. We've added a link to pricing information to each primitive to address a common customer complaint, that pricing information is difficult to find and understand.
6. We've combined quickstarts, samples, and tutorials into one directory per primitive, called "Samples and tutorials", to address a customer complaint that our category names were confusing.
7. We added a directory to each primitive for Resources, to keep important information close by.
8. We added root-level directories for Common Scenarios, Troubleshooting, and Help and support.
9. We did a full pass across all TOC entries to ensure correct casing, and edited entries for readability and consistency with page content, as well as for length to adhere to Microsoft guidelines and improve readability.

These changes have led us to a structure that we feel less taxing for the reader, especially on first visit, maps more closely to the customer’s mental model of the information by focusing on the job-to-be-done rather than content type, helps lead them through the content from easiest to hardest, helps make it easier for them to find the information they need when they need it, and helps remind them of all the different features we support. Here’s what the table of contents looks like on page load as of Feb 6:

A screenshot of the updated structure of our documentation site on initial load.

These changes are live now. You can see them on the Azure Communication Services Technical documentation site.

What’s next:

• In the coming weeks we will continue to make refinements based on customer feedback and our assessment of usage metrics.
• Our content team will begin updating article content to improve readability and enhance learning.
• We will be monitoring our changes and seeking your feedback.

How will we monitor the effectiveness of our changes?

To track the effectiveness of our changes and to be sure we haven’t regressed, we’ll be tracking a few key metrics

• Bounce rates: We’ll be on the lookout for an increase in bounce rates, which would indicate that customers are frequently landing on pages that don’t meet their expectations.
• Page Views: We’ll be tracking the number of page views for our most-visited pages across different features. A decrease in page views for these pages will be an indicator that customers are not able to find pages that had previously been popular.
• Customer Interviews: We will be reaching out to some of you to get your impressions of the new structure of our content over the coming weeks.
• Customer Surveys: We've created a survey that you can use to give us your feedback. We'll also be adding this link to select pages to allow you to tell us what you think of our changes while you're using them!

So, give our new site navigation a try, and please don’t hesitate to share your feedback either by filling out our survey or by sending an email to acs-docs-feedback@microsoft.com. We look forward to hearing from you! A