Why There Are No Shortcuts to Good Documentation
Don’t be tempted. Just don’t.
Technical documentation offers answers to complex questions but is sometimes just as complex to read and to understand. Good technical documentation should simplify the complexity, but the steps to achieve this goal often lead to a path full of conflicts. Challenges to maintain quality as well as organization and value within the manual occur and it happens that writers often cannot find a way out of the misery.
Let’s address some key points of superior technical documentation.
Know Your Start
It is a real temptation to start writing documentation “from the beginning.” Of course, introduction and context are relevant parts, but a better way to start writing is to work bottom-up. Why? Because contextualizing before documenting may lead to redundancy. This is difficult to read if the user is looking for specific answers.
Dive directly into constructing documentation from reference materials, procedures, and examples. It will happen that in the middle of the process it becomes impossible to proceed without introduction and context: so write it. But don’t lose yourself in too much context. Write just as much as needed to be helpful and not a single word more. And: don’t forget the power of visuals.
Know Your Organization
How do average users read manuals? Usually, they tend to bounce between paragraphs, therefore it’s important to avoid fragmenting of information. It makes the resource harder to maintain and leads users to find the right answer in the wrong context. If a question may be answered in multiple locations within a document, it might indicate that there is a major problem in the organization of the documentation.
Adding some level of semantic markup to the documentation improves clarity and reduces redundancy. Semantic markups refer to systems that make it possible to annotate text with tags and identifiers that make documentation easier to index and process pragmatically. The key is to make the annotations unobtrusive for readers, but rich enough to improve the effectiveness of search tools. Also, allow the user to read tactically by providing signposts like tables of contents and indexes.
Know Your Audience
Documentation serves different audiences and providing documentation that addresses the diversity of user experience is difficult. Different classes of users have different kinds of problems and ask different kinds of questions. They also have different usage patterns based on their level of experience and proficiency.
Good documentation is useful to multiple audiences. Nevertheless, different audiences need different levels of detail and will approach their use from different perspectives. The target audience defines the shape of the documentation. Technical writers need to reconsider the granularity of the information in the documentation constantly, but never lose focus on the target group itself: the users provide the most important information in form of support questions and inquiries. A great way to ground future documentation projects is considering the users’ needs and questions. This ensures that the information stays relevant, focused, and functional.
Know Your Path
No documentation is perfect. There will always be errors and glitches in every piece of writing, which is part of the whole development process. Not only the product continues to develop and change, but also the interaction of users with the product due to experiences. Also, good writing comes down to editing. Along the way, you’ll want to get feedback to ensure that things are not overly complicated as well es properly explained.
Once the documentation is complete, keep it up to date and make sure it continues to address the current needs of users. Maintaining documentation is time-consuming and needs dedication, but it’s crucial. It makes both documentation and product more valuable and durable. Take pride in documentation, treat it with dedication, and the outcome will be great.
