Your Writing Dept Blog Creating quality user documentation and putting the “M” in RTFM.

Quick Reference Guides are more useful than a 150-page user doc

By Ron Creel

Tom Johnson’s blog, I’d Rather Be Writing, posted Minimizing Documentation not a moment too soon.

I’m working on a project to boil a 150-page software user document down to a one-page reference guide that can be tacked to a CSR’s cube wall. Our goal with the one-page reference guide is to give the CSR a description of all the navigation elements and application functionality so they can quickly navigate to where they want to go without first having to trudge through the complete 150-page user doc.

Of course, the full doc is important for learning and supporting the overall application, but the one-page doc will serve to cut through all the error messages, screen paths and extra material.

Give users a quick reference guide

You can give users a short quick reference guide (under five pages). This gets the user up and running with the system. Quick reference guides reduce the instruction for the system to the core tasks and presents those instructions in an abbreviated, concise way. If the user needs more information, point him or her to a full database or online help file where or she can search for answers.

This all comes down to giving the end user the documentation that is most useful to them and their needs as they do their job. We may be required to write a 150-page document to support an application, but the user should have a small version of the information made available to them so they can quickly and easily do their job without digging through a lot of meaningless documentation. A short reference guide should not be overlooked when building a document set.

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