Four Takeaways From Our Latest Customer Success Story: Unqork — The “No-Code” Enterprise Application Platform

Since 2017, Unqork, Inc. has been empowering Fortune 500 companies to create custom applications faster and more cost-effectively using its visual, no-code application platform. Forbes recently predicted the company to be a unicorn IPO in the next couple of years, and the company has “raised nearly $160 million from investors such as Goldman Sachs and Alphabet investment fund CapitalG, with revenues up 320% in Q1 2020 alone.” To support this growth and help its customers use its platform, the company built the Unqork Academy learning management system (LMS) website using MadCap Flare and MadCap Central.

When browsing for solutions to build their Academy LMS site, there were four requirements from the Unqork team:

• Deliver a persona-driven Learning Management System that empowers Unqork customers to educate themselves on using its application platform.
• Facilitate content re-use across the Unqork Academy LMS, embedded product Help, so the client enablement team can keep pace with the business’ rapid product rollouts and company growth.
• Foster collaboration among the many Unqork teams that contribute to the company’s educational content.
• Create attractive content that aligns with the Unqork brand and creates an inviting experience for users.

Keeping Pace With A Rapidly Growing Team

Prior to MadCap Flare, Unqork produced content for the Academy LMS by collaborating on the cloud-based Google Docs word processor and then publishing the final documentation as PDFs. However, with the business’ rapid pace of development, it was instantly clear that Unqork would soon need a professional technical authoring solution to keep pace.

“We were creating multiple versions of documents: one for our platform, another for our LMS, and a PDF to send to customers,” recalled Olga Gomonova, Unqork head of client enablement. ”For a really young, fast-growing organization with updates happening weekly, that approach quickly became difficult to manage.”

Following their first year, Unqork determined it was time to start looking for a more robust single-source publishing platform that would allow them to create a single document and publish across various channels. “Flare stood out for its usability, single-sourcing, support for integrating with everything, and the ability to create gorgeous state-of-the-art documentation,” Olga explained.

Creating a Learning Environment for Multiple Users

Today, the enablement team uses MadCap Flare to deliver educational content on the Unqork Academy, a standalone LMS website. Users range widely from skilled developers to business professionals. The site supports these different personas by letting them start on different learning paths based on their level of experience—from foundational technology concepts to the core Unqork platform to different vertical areas of functionality. Collectively, there are hundreds of topics covering different capabilities of the platform and various best practices.

At the same time, Unqork has a major initiative around integrating documentation into the application platform as Help content, so users can access information on the fly when they need it while using the product. Because the platform is constantly evolving, Unqork’s enablement team is continually updating the content. Finally, the team also creates PDFs or HTML5 files for partners or prospective clients, typically as part of the sales cycle from the same core content.

Enabling Collaboration Across Multiple Departments

Educational content is created by different employees across Unqork, including members of the solutions, product and sales teams in addition to the enablement team. Technical writers then will develop the documentation and review it with the subject matter expert (SME) to make sure everything was captured correctly. Additionally, the head of instructional design may review instructional content to ensure that it is written in the correct sequence and covers the right information to support a given learning path.

In the past, collaboration was accomplished by using Google Docs, sending PDFs, or communicating over Slack or email. However, these channels became difficult to manage as the team scaled up, and the number of documents grew. “If we had 10 documents with three people involved in the production of each, that meant there were 30 versions flying around in the course of a week. Coordination became very difficult,” Olga recalled.

Because the technical writers at Unqork were using MadCap Flare, it was a natural evolution for the company to add MadCap Central, the cloud-based solution for content management, collaboration and version control.

Now, with MadCap Central, a technical writer can send an invitation to an SME or other team member to review a document. The invitation is picked up, and the person is taken to the MadCap Central portal where he or she can review, edit, or comment on the content using MadCap Central’s cloud-based editor. These changes are saved automatically, and then the technical writer is notified when the document has been reviewed. Everything is integrated with the original documents, so team members no longer have to copy and paste content multiple times.

An Inviting Experience That is Marketing Approved

While internal efficiencies were a huge factor and have been important, a top priority for Unqork has been creating attractive and inviting educational content for its customers that is an extension of the company’s brand and marketing.

“Unqork is a bit of a playful brand. We have a magical quality to our platform, where you can do anything you want. It's very creative. We have to make sure our educational content matches that,” Olga explains.

Using MadCap Flare, the client enablement team has built the Academy as a modern website that features a responsive design to automatically adjust to users’ screens, native search, and robust navigation that lets users skip through pages to get to the lessons they want.

Unqork’s educational content has been very popular with users and encourages them to rely on it for self-paced learning.

“Users really love the Academy LMS and product Help experience we’ve created with Flare because it lets them find the right piece of information at the right time,” Olga says. “This has helped us to create a well-enabled, do-it-yourself community that is more adept at using our platform and requires less help from the support team.”

To read the full case study, visit our customer success stories here.