Although a user guide may appear simple, many businesses make mistakes that make the documentation ineffective. A poorly written guide can confuse users, increase customer support calls, and negatively impact the overall user experience of a software or service.
It is clear that a well-planned, well-structured guide will not only show the user what functions can be used but also instill confidence in the user using your software or service.
A user guide template can promote consistency within a company, improve clarity of documentation, and tools like Dr. Explain can aid companies in generating manuals with correct structure and navigation.
This includes screenshots for specific features and menus. In this document, we will look at common errors that occur during documentation.
Overuse of Jargon
The main problems when producing documentation are the overuse of jargon. Whilst a programmer will use the terminology, the general user will probably become confused when descriptions of every feature have extremely detailed text.
Example of jargon: “Go to the interface located in the configuration tab of the software,” whereas in simpler terms, “Open settings”. Or even simpler than that, “Click on ‘save your changes'” and compared to the original description, “Perform the update modification process”.
Poor Organisation
Writing instructions without planning them results in a very confusing and unstructured document that takes far too long to get relevant help for the particular problem. A user guide should be organised by:
1. Introduction of the software
2. System requirements
3. How to install the software
4. How to set up an account
5. How to use each of the features
6. How to fix errors that may occur
7. Frequently asked questions (FAQ)
8. How to seek assistance
A template document would encourage all aspects of this to remain within a company.
Complicated Paragraphs
The vast majority of users who consult a user guide will simply wish to scan over the pages of instructions and seek information without the need to read large amounts of text and lengthy descriptions.
A user guide that would appeal to users would therefore have short, to-the-point paragraphs, bulleted lists, and procedures broken down into lists and using headings and sub-headings where appropriate.
Lack of Visual Support
Many user guide template contains only text information, which can cause the user to become baffled at what they are looking at and also to have a poor user experience, as there is nothing visual to rely on for support.
To ensure a good user experience, one would also want to use visuals such as Screenshots of the software. Highlights on certain buttons or menus.
Flow diagrams can be used to explain features and procedures within the software, along with UI icons. Tools such as Dr.Explain can also help automatically generate documents with most of the required visuals.
No Troubleshooting Section
Many of the people reading a user guide are searching for a fix for a particular problem they are having and are looking for an immediate answer to the situation.
By excluding this from your user guide, the user will be forced to look elsewhere, potentially costing the company the assistance of a customer support representative.
Outdated Documents
An update may not sound much to an end user, but an update to software could make previous documentation very difficult to read and irrelevant, which is why documentation should be up to date and easy to read.
The user would start to lose confidence in the product with inaccurate documentation available.
Last Words
Most of the people reading documentation online want the solution immediately, and are not in a position to scroll through pages of irrelevant web pages trying to locate a specific piece of information.
A good user guide is accessible from a clear link and also easy to navigate, which means that the website it belongs to should have an internal search tool and clear headings within the site. At the same time, a proper user guide template provides a ready-to-fill content template for use.
