You wrote a good help article. Clear steps, a screenshot for each one, the exact answer in the first line.
Then the ticket came in asking the thing the article answers in that first line.
Every team has two reflexes when this happens. The first is "our documentation needs work." So someone rewrites the article, adds a video, reorganizes the help center. The second is "the product is too complicated." So someone proposes a redesign to simplify the flow.
Both reflexes are wrong, and they're wrong for the same reason. They assume the user will stop, find your explanation, and read it. The user you actually have will do neither.
Meet the user you actually have
Jules Walter, who worked on onboarding at Slack and YouTube, describes them without flattery. Users "are time-crunched and distracted." They "might not read labels or text." They "might not be willing to spend even a few seconds to figure out what to do next." And the moment they "feel confused or nervous that they might be doing something wrong," they leave.
Anuj Rathi puts it more bluntly: the user is "lazy, vain, and selfish." Their internal monologue is "I don't have time, so blow my mind away." That sounds harsh until you remember how you behave inside every new tool you've ever opened. You don't read. You poke at it, and if it fights back, you close the tab.
Merci Grace ran the usability sessions that prove it. Her team built the standard intro carousel, the seven things you must know about the product, and watched real users hit it and say, out loud, "No. Click. I'm not going to read that." Her summary is the line every team should tape to the wall: "People have really limited attention and no one cares about your product the way that you do."
So a help center is built for a user who does not exist. The accurate article isn't the problem. The expectation that anyone will go read it is.
Simplifying isn't the fix either
The other reflex, redesign the product until it's simple enough to need no docs, fails for a different reason.
Elena Verna is direct about it: "If you ever have a line item on your roadmap that says simplified onboarding, please cross it out." Her point is that "you never solve a problem of simplifying." The user isn't stuck because there are too many steps. They're stuck because, at one specific moment, they don't know what the next step is. Strip the product down far enough to remove that moment and you "lose an identity of what you even do."
And the usual middle-ground fix, sprinkle static hints around the UI, fails silently. Grace watched a set of tooltips get ignored for six months because "people don't understand that they're supposed to click on them." Lauryn Isford points at the deeper miss: a tooltip that says "This is automations" isn't help, it's an announcement of something the company built. It names a feature. It doesn't get the confused user to the thing they were trying to do.
The friction worth fixing was never complexity, and it was never a missing paragraph in the help center. It's cognitive load at one moment: the user doesn't know where to go next, right now, on this screen.
What to do instead this week
Here's the exercise, and it starts from data you already have.
Open your help center analytics and take your single most-viewed article. That view count is not a sign your docs are working. It's a heat map of one specific confusion, reported over and over by the small fraction of users willing to go looking. For everyone who read it, many more hit the same wall and just left.
Now find the exact moment in the product that sends people to that article. The screen, the step, the decision point. Then put the answer there, in the flow, at that moment, so the user never has to leave to get it.
If the only place your help exists is a center the user has to exit the product to reach, you have already lost the ones Walter and Rathi describe, which is most of them. The help has to come to the moment. The user will not go to the help.
This is the gap we built Deway to close, guiding the user through the confusing moment in real time, in the product, so they finish the job instead of stopping to go read about it. But you don't need us to run the exercise above.
Pull your top help article. Don't rewrite it.
Ask why the product sends people looking for it, and what it would take to answer the question at the exact moment it gets asked, without the user ever reading a word.
Alon Binman is the co-founder of Deway (deway.ai), an AI-native autonomous adoption layer for SaaS products. Before Deway, Alon spent 15+ years at the intersection of product and customer success, including roles as a Product Manager, founder, data and product strategy consultant, and Senior Solution Architect at Mixpanel. You can reach Alon on LinkedIn.