Case study: organizing a knowledge base that people use

Our old knowledge base mirrored the company org chart. Nobody could find anything.

The problem

• 60% of searches returned zero results
• Authors duplicated pages because they could not find existing ones
• Support kept answers in private threads

The restructure

We rebuilt navigation around tasks, not teams:

1. Getting started
2. How-to guides
3. Troubleshooting
4. Reference

Every page answers one question, in under 400 words, with a "what next?" link at the bottom.

Results after 90 days

Takeaway

Write for the person searching at 4 a.m. with a specific problem. Everything else follows.