Collections and articles
How your help centre is organised, and how much organising it needs.
By HeyThula · Updated
Your help centre has two levels: collections, and the articles inside them. That's the whole structure — there are no sub-collections, no tags, no categories.
The flatness is deliberate. Support content that needs a three-level hierarchy is usually content that needs fewer, clearer articles.
Collections
A collection is a group of related articles — "Getting started", "Billing", "Your account". They appear on your help centre's front page, and they're how a visitor who doesn't know what to search for finds their way in.
Aim for a handful. A visitor scanning your front page should be able to read every collection name in a couple of seconds and recognise which one holds their problem.
You can reorder them, and each one can carry an icon.
Articles
An article answers one question. It has a title, an optional subtitle, and a body.
The subtitle does more work than it looks. It's the summary line under the title in lists and search results, and for a step-by-step guide it becomes the description search engines show. An article without one is harder to scan and weaker in search.
One subject per article
This is the rule worth holding to, because it pays twice.
A visitor gets a page that answers their question and stops, rather than a long page they have to hunt through. And the AI retrieves whole articles as grounding — so a page covering five topics matches all five weakly, while five focused pages each match strongly.
When an article starts needing the word "also", it's usually two articles.
Naming
Title articles the way customers would ask, not the way you'd name the feature internally. "Why can't I see my teammate's conversations?" finds its reader; "Membership scoping" does not.
The AI matches on meaning rather than keywords, so you don't need to stuff titles with variations — but you do need the words your customers actually use.
Where to start
Don't design the whole structure first. Write the articles you already answer by hand every week, put them in two or three obvious collections, and let the structure follow the content. The conversations in your inbox marked Needs human are a fair list of what to write next.