Throughout the years I’ve often been working on release notes. I found that many companies did them to tick a box, but they didn’t really believe in them being a user engagement and retention tool. Guess what? They can be if you approach them with a user-centric mind.
This article contains the guidelines I put in place when writing release notes. I shared it with someone in the Content + UX Slack, and they’ve asked me to share it internally, so I thought I’d write an article to facilitate sharing.
Pair the guidelines with your company’s style guide or use them to spark conversations with your stakeholders, I’m sure you’ll start seeing the results right away.
This article contains a set of best practices to write awesome release notes.
Theoretically, everything that has an impact - direct or indirect - on the user. For example:
In this example you can see two ways to say the same thing:
| DO | DON’T |
|---|---|
| We implemented a new backend logic to retrieve user data. This improves performance by reducing the number of API calls. | Sync performance improvements |
In the example above, notice what the explanation tries to achieve: Between lines, it’s implying: “ok, this is very boring and technical, but before user files were retrieved hierarchically, which took more time and computing power. They’re now retrieved at once, which makes sync faster and more efficient to process. Something you won’t directly notice but that’s very good for you.”
If we don’t explain it that way, it becomes more about proving that we’ve been busy than showing the real impact, so we’d rather leave that out.
The answer is simple: whenever they add value. Here’s some questions that can guide you. If the answer is yes, then go ahead and add a screenshot.