However, structuring user assistance isn’t as simple and obvious as it may seem. Providing user-friendly structure and navigation is just as important as providing well-written content. Planning and Structuring Helpful User Assistance – Contents, Structure, User NavigationĮven the best information is worthless if users can’t find it. The books in the series strictly avoid all sorts of lengthy theory but provide best practices, hands-on solutions, clear recommendations, working aids, and examples that you can easily remember and readily apply to your own work. The Technical Documentation Best Practices Series is a compilation of hands-on books that encompass the whole process of creating user manuals, online help systems, screencasts, plus other forms of user assistance and technical communication.Įach book of the series covers one specific task in the process so that people who are involved in only one phase of a technical documentation project can easily focus on just that part. ▪ Video design Technical Documentation Best Practices Series ▪ Creating images of hardware and software ▪ Structuring principles, including building topics, establishing headings, and determining the best possible order of information The book is exemplary for what you need to achieve as well: deliver the essential information on as few pages as possible in a clear and simple form. You get hands-on advice and simple, catchy examples-free from theoretical elaborations, highbrow grammar terms, and other shoptalk. This book provides you with a compilation of those best practices that are going to make a real difference. The Best Best Practices for Creating Clear and Useful Manuals, Help Systems, and Other Forms of User Assistanceĭo you want to make the user manuals or online help systems of your products stand out from those of your competitors but don’t have the time to study a dozen all-embracing textbooks about technical writing before getting down to work? If you like the book and actually read larger sections, please be fair and buy a copy. Note: The original book has significantly more pages than this preview. Technical Documentation Short and Sweetĭo you need to write some technical documentation? Do you want to do a good job but don’t have much time that you can spend? The book provides hands-on advice and simple, catchy examples-free from theoretical elaborations, highbrow grammar terms, and other shoptalk. To standardize solutions and to allow others to also benefit from them, the Rich Documentation Design Concept with its Impulse Method and its Minimal Brainwork Principles emerged. It is also time to take more account of the fact that a lot of documentation today is online documentation, which presents a whole new set of possibilities compared to documentation printed on paper or compared to a PDF file.įor more than 25 years of consulting and editorial work, I have encountered this issue in almost every project. But it is time to reinterpret and to rethink them at one point or another. This does not mean that established documentation concepts and methods are inappropriate. Users must laboriously separate valuable content from irrelevant clutter. The few important and relevant pieces of information about backgrounds and correlations are buried in the documentation and are not found.Ĭreation, maintenance, translation, and printing of the documentation are more expensive than necessary. In extreme cases, for example, they learn that they can save their data using the “Save” function, or that the “Print” function is used to print a document. Despite the high effort put into writing such documentation, users often learn a lot of useless and trivial things. However, many classic documentation concepts are still based on the dogmas of “consistency” and “completeness”.ĭue to the wealth of functions and settings that many products offer today, such documentation is hardly any longer manageable – neither for its authors nor for its users. In addition, many products are becoming increasingly easy to use. Most people can handle technology much better today than in the past. Methods for Creating Concise Technical Documentation of Maximum ValueĪvailable to download as an ebook (PDF) right here If you find the content useful, please purchase a copy. Note: The preview includes the entire document.
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