Effective Development of User Documentation

Most of you may know the phrase: "If everything goes wrong, read the guidelines at last." But how should you write guidelines so that everyone would like to read them – even before something goes wrong? How can you make it more informative for both experienced users and neophytes?

A project can be considered successful if it provides a solution that creates a certain value for the customer. And this value has several dimensions. First of all, this is a direct satisfaction with customers' business needs, of course. However, there are some indirect things that affect customers' businesses as well. For example, how fast can new employees study the solution and use it without errors and delays? If this process takes a long time, customers could lose money or maybe be deceived by clients. Well-designed user documentation can help to avoid such unpleasant situations because employees (users) would find in it all the needed descriptions, instructions, tips & tricks to do their job correctly and quickly. So, user documentation is one of the project's important deliverables.

This course covers the entire process of creating end-user documentation – from first defining its structure to reviewing and publication. A lot of attention is paid to various aspects of correct wording and formatting of text. Students will be asked to analyze and correct numerous examples of clumsy phrasings from different sources: documents, ad messages, and news.

Writing technical documents (such as specifications, requirements, etc.) is not an inherent task for technical writers, yet they should be able to understand such documents and retrieve necessary information from them – for writing end-user documentation. Therefore, this course is also focused on one of the forms of requirements description: use cases, which can be easily transformed into step-by-step instructions for users.

We are surrounded by lots of bad text samples, but after this course, participants will be able to reduce its quantity by producing readable, well-structured, and useful documents.