Gripes on Retool Documentation & things I wish were better

[JoeyKarczewski]

Hiya,

I wanted to note the reduction of usability I've felt with Retool documentation over the past year and wanted to see if anyone else felt the same

Here are a couple of my gripes:

Arcades
While I love the use of arcades to have guided walkthroughs for SAAS products, I find that I personally don't use them when searching for an answer in the Retool docs. When deep in development, I want a well indexed guidebook to find the answer. With Arcades I'm forced to click and read the narrative of the arcade, not allowing me to skim for the answer.

Docs outline

I find this new outline extremely hard to navigate beyond the Retool for beginners sections. As a heavy Retool user, I find most my time is being pushed towards beginner tutorials, and generally find it difficult to use the outline when searching for any content.

Poor Search functionality
This search rarely surfaces the answer I'm looking for. When I search something here I find that I'm pushed towards a generalised page that doesn't have the answer. Such as 'Creating a JS query' or 'Javascript' . This is particularly where @stefancvrkotic on the BT team got the idea for https://practicemode.retool.com/p/retool-ai-helper

The rise of the Retool Forums as a falibile source of truth
Lastly, atleast for me, the Retool forum has become the source of truth for a lot of these questions. With the Retool forum being the source of truth, Retool runs the risk of giving people outdated information that could potentially be incorrect or from a previous iteration of Retool & no longer best practice.

I do want to say however that I think Retool has done a great job with the Retool forum!

Does anyone else feel similar to me?

[stefancvrkotic]

Second this - feeling like forums have become source of truth for Retool instead of docs.

[khill-fbmc]

I come here way more than the Docs.

Also, for me personally, I cannot learn from those paced / stepped videos. I need to just read and see examples.

[DavidD]

Just experienced this. Was looking everywhere on retool docs about pricing for Retool DB beyond 5gb and had to find a random comment on the forums to answer my question

I used the docs consistently back in 2021/2022 but the community is way more useful these days

[joeBumbaca]

Hey @stefancvrkotic @khill-fbmc @DavidD @JoeyKarczewski! Really appreciate the feedback, and I've passed it along to the docs team. Just wanted to let you know that they are working on some big improvements:

• New content organization to make it much easier to browse and find relevant content.
• Better search functionality with more relevant results.
• Launching a docs survey for users to provide more specific feedback and suggestions that goes directly to our team.
• Improving how we identify and update outdated information.

We don't have an narrow ETA, but a lot of this is already in the works and we hope to have it launched in H1 of this year.

We have been putting a lot of effort into making the Forum a place where you can find relevant information and we're glad that its been a place that you feel confident going. We'll continue to make improvements here also, as it's a work in progress.

Thanks again for taking the time to log this. Have a great day!