When individual investors or traders seek how to use techniques similar to those of professional traders on Wall Street, many turn to Online Trading Academy (OTA), a world leader in financial education. Today, over 80,000 students take advantage of OTA’s interactive Help website, CliK to educate themselves on trading and investing in various financial markets. When building their platform, OTA team sought to MadCap Software to help:

  • Create a modern Help website that complements OTA’s leading-edge CliK analysis and trading platform.
  • Optimize the search experiences of students and internal users of CliK, alike.
  • Ensure content keeps pace with new classes and updates to the CliK platform.
  • Support audits required for education in the online trading sector.

Streamlining Content Delivery

OTA’s educators have now taught thousands of students using the CliK analysis and trading platform. The Help website features more than 7,500 files of information about the CliK platform and how to use it as part of the eLearning and live classes provided by OTA. In addition to students, OTA departments also use the Help website to train employees on new features in CliK.

“Using MadCap Software’s products, I can honestly and proudly say that I have never missed a software release update—even when those deadlines were incredibly tight,” Sandra notes.

To ensure that the documentation updates keep pace with the continuing evolution of the classes and new CliK features, OTA relies on the topic-based authoring, conditional text, and snippets capabilities in MadCap Flare. Notably, the team creates copies of the topics that will change extensively in the next release, which are kept separate from the published Help and are updated as the developers provide more information. Once a topic is complete, the team can replace the old version in the Help build.

“Topic-based authoring with Flare has saved me countless hours as the CliK software platform that I document has extensive changes in every release,” Sandra explains.

Improving Content Quality with Search

The CliK team also relies on the actionable user analytics functionality in MadCap Central  to track user behavior, such as how many times users searched on a term, whether or not they succeeded in their search, and what articles they viewed. For example, OTA educates students on the use of Fibonacci studies and ratios in online trading, but MadCap Central’s analysis of these users’ experiences revealed that many could not find information on the CliK documentation site because they were misspelling the word. Using this insight, the OTA team was able to add search terms with the most common misspellings to help students find the articles they need.

“Help is only useful when people can find the right information,” Sandra observes. “I love that MadCap Central lets me view what our users have been entering into the search field, and if their searches are returning data. This allows me to create changes and additions based on actual data for a continuous documentation improvement process. This is one of the best features MadCap Software provides.”

Additionally, OTA relies on the version control functionality in MadCap Central to meet regulatory requirements for documenting versions of the Help website.

“Auditors will ask, ‘What was the version at that particular day? How can you prove it?’. MadCap Central makes keeping track of the versions easy, so we can validate our responses,” says Sandra.

Creating a Modern Web Experience

OTA has been committed to creating a modern web experience that provides an intuitive, easy-to-navigate experience for users. The company relies on the search capabilities in MadCap Flare, which goes beyond the search functionality of Google to let users search on terms that the CliK team adds to the index file. Additionally, OTA uses MadCap Flare to create micro content that is presented as the top result for relevant searches.

Moving forward, OTA is investigating the use of micro content to build context-sensitive Help, as well as create a chatbot that would be available to assist with common questions when support is not open.

“By using Flare’s micro content to provide chatbots on our Help website, we will be able to give our students more 24/7 support,” Sandra notes.

With the core Help website for CliK up and running smoothly, the team at OTA is looking to expand the content it delivers using MadCap Software’s products. The company is planning to release multiple versions of the CliK platform, which will require corresponding versions of the Help content. Additionally, to serve its customers worldwide, OTA will eventually begin offering its Help content in different languages. Further in the roadmap, the company sees potential for using MadCap Software to deliver additional types of content across the organization. 
Looking to read the full success story? Learn more about how OTA is utilizing Madcap Software solutions here.