Simplify Your Documentation

Answer Questions

What is the purpose of your manual? In most cases the purpose of the manual is to make it so that your user does not have to email or call you to find out how to do something. That really is the point, but few manuals are written with this in mind. I see a lot of manuals that talk about the philosophy of a product or the architecture behind it. I personally have never had a tech support email or call come in that asked me about the philosophy, the design or architecture of a product. Tech support calls usually start with "How do I …?"

Well, if we are trying to decrease support requests with our documentation then we should probably answer the questions that our customers have. The good news is that actually makes your documentation a lot easier to create.

To show you how to do this I am going to create a manual on how to use WordPress. Now, I am not going to actually complete the entire manual but I will show you how I would scope things out. Once you have things scoped out in ScreenSteps it is actually very easy to go back and fill in the lessons you have outlined.

Create a New Manual

First I will create a new manual in ScreenSteps.

And give it a name.

Now I have a manual with nothing in it. To get things started I am just going to write down the questions that people might ask. Each question will be a new lesson. I don’t really need to do any planning at this point. I am just going to write down the questions as I think of them. (Note: You may prefer to do this in your favorite outline application first but I will show it in ScreenSteps).

To do this in ScreenSteps just select the New Lesson icon.

Here you can see that I have a list of questions that a user might ask. Now, as I look at these, some, like "How do I Upload a File?" are pretty easy to answer in just a few steps. But some, like "How do I Install WordPress?" might take a little more explanation.

For my next step I am going to organize these a bit. Some of the questions I will split into new multiple lessons to make them a little easier to create. I personally hate creating long lessons. They are a pain to make and boring to read.

Lessons Reorganized

Here you can see how I have reorganized things a bit. I have created a couple of sections (1) and have organized the lessons underneath each section (2).

Fill in the Lessons

Now, all I need to do is go back and fill in the lessons. Since the lesson title is a question it is really easy for me to decide what I need to do. I just need to create a lesson that answers the question. Once I am done, I might rename the lessons a bit. For example, I might change "How do I Upload a File?" to "Uploading a File to WordPress" but that is largely a matter of personal preference.

Conclusion

That is pretty much all their is to it. Try it out for yourself. I think that you will find that in afternoon you can have some pretty complete documentation that will be easy to create, easy to read and will be easy to update in the future.

If you want to get really fancy, then try this with ScreenSteps Live. Then, whenever a customer asks a question that you didn’t cover in your manual you can just add the answer to your online manual. We have been doing that for about 6 months now and it has worked really well.