I was updating some end user docs today that were task-heavy, and after a while could barely bring myself to read through the highly repetitive, obvious steps.
It dawned on me that none of the procedures were doing much to help the user. The user needs to know:
- That they can do things.
- Where to do them.
After that, they can figure it out. (I mean, this is really easy stuff.)
It's a rule of thumb of tech writing that you don't document wizards. Some wizards may require help buttons on the screens, but no wizard should require user manual content.
Why not, I thought, use the same rule of thumb for simple tasks? So I happily ditched a lot of carefully written numbered steps and replaced them with much briefer sections per task - sometimes just a sentence.
I did this as a provisional approach until I get some feedback. But quite by accident tonight I stumbled on a post in the blog Gryphon Mountain Journal that presents research that comes to the same conclusion (Project Pinnacle, Episode 4: Rethinking What the Users Need).
I love excising useless bulk!
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