writing help documentation

How to Write Good Documentation (A Step-by-Step Guide)

Your life can be so much easier once you know how to write documentation — good, helpful documentation that actually gives its users what they need from it.

After all, everyone reads documentation:

• Marketing teams work with playbooks — a sort of marketing documentation. 
• Support and technical teams use user guides, installation manuals, code notes — “core” technical documentation.
• Others rely on standard operating procedures, reference material, process documents, checklists — typical company knowledge documentation.

Customers, too, use customer-facing documentation to learn their way around a solution or debug their issues on their own (tier 0 support).

While there’s no one standard way to create all this documentation, the fundamental steps remain the same. But before we see those, let’s take a quick look at the different documentation types. Based on its purpose, a documentation piece can be one of four types.

In This Article

Types of documentation

Determine if you truly need to document it, find out when to document it, zero in on the best way to document it.

• Decide what to write
• Once done, don't forget to add a reviewing and testing part.

Set an update schedule

• Wrapping it up…

In his  talk  on the types of documentation, Daniele Procida or Divio AG categorizes documentation into four types:

• learning-oriented tutorials
• goal-oriented how-to guides
• understanding-oriented discussions
• information-oriented reference material

As you can understand from how he puts it, every piece of documentation has a different objective, and those responsible for the documentation must establish it each time they set out to create one.  With that in mind, let’s start with our guide on how to write documentation.

Your product might do a hundred things. There may be even more ways to customize it. You could have a codebase of thousands of lines. And you might also be generating a LOT of knowledge in your daily work. 

But it’s not possible to document everything… and not everything needs to be documented. 

So before answering the “ how to write documentation ” question, know if you must document it at all.

Before you document, think about your target readers. The target readers for your documentation could be anyone from an end-user to your software developer(s) or HR person. Are they knowledge workers ? Think about what these target audiences struggle with… and if you can genuinely empower them to do better by documenting.

Also, think about how they will use it. Think in terms of how the intended users will interact with your documentation.

Will your customers follow your documentation step-by-step to get started with your solution? Which makes your documentation “goal-oriented.”

Or will your developers use it as they work and collaborate on your next release cycle? In which case, you’re looking at “understanding-oriented” documentation.

Or will your HR resource refer to it when processing applications? You have “information-oriented” documentation here.

And will your documentation really help them?

Other than these, you might also want to think about how your documentation efforts will help you at a higher level:

• Will your documentation improve your tier zero support and enable your end-users to resolve their issues on their own (deflection)? 
• Would it make your teams get better at what they do?
• Will your team get more productive? 

The general idea is to not start too early (or late).

Unless you aren’t sure about how a process is actually going to play out or how you’re going to execute your “vision,” it’s best not to document it and wait until things materialize a bit.

For example, if you’re planning a significant update in the next quarter and the work is only in the high-level conceptual stage, don’t engage documentation resources just yet. 

This is the “Agile” approach to documentation.

Often, the best time to do certain documentation types (like procedures and pr ocesses ) is when you’re actually executing them. 

Depending on the types of documentation you need, you need one or multiple places to hold it all. These work as your single source of truth. 

Yelp’s Chastity Blackwell shares  some  of the frustrations when all your documentation isn’t stored nicely in one place:

You’ve got a doc that explains everything about that service and you’re sure the info you need to solve this incident is in there — somewhere. “You can try looking for that in the wiki, or maybe it’s in the Google Docs repo. Oh, and I’ve got some notes in my home directory, and I think I saw some email about that a while ago.”

Naturally, you don’t want this to happen to you. That’s why you must choose your documentation tool(s) thoughtfully. If you’re documenting for end-users, it’s best to use an easy-to-populate knowledge base solution like  Heroic Knowledge Base . You can find some alternatives here .

If you’re documenting for your teams, go with a wiki solution like  WikiPress  or an internal knowledge management solution  Heroic Knowledge Base  (yeah, it doubles up as one!). Or, check out some of these  options for knowledge management solutions .

Finally, if you’re documenting code, you might want to consider some of the more specialized  technical documentation solutions . Some general-purpose knowledge base solutions like Heroic Knowledge Base work just as well as technical documentation solutions too.

When you choose your documentation system, make sure to pick one that’s easy to update because you might find yourself updating your documentation often! Your documentation tool should also offer some excellent searching functionality. 

Decide what to write 

Because documentation can take so many forms, it’s essential to finalize a format before writing it. 

For example, at HeroThemes, we use a mix of FAQs, installation tutorials, troubleshooting guides, lists of tips and tricks, and others for our customer-facing documentation. Most of our customers also use a similar composition. 

Depending on the documentation you’re producing and for whom, you’ll need to know what all forms your documentation can take. Jacob Kaplan-Moss talks in detail about these in  What to write . He explains how tutorials, topical guides, and reference material make up the bulk of documentation in most cases: 

• Tutorials:  Tutorials or how-tos are the most basic form of documentation. For our customer-facing documentation, tutorials are our how-to resources that our users use to add a knowledge base to their website with our plugin or populate it with articles. 
• Topical guides:   Topical guides tend to go a lot deeper than tutorials and cater to more specialized topics. For us, these are our guides on topics like translation and integrations. We loosely categorize these as advanced topics.
• Reference:  In our customer-facing documentation context, this type has information on our integrations with our partners that our users might find helpful when setting up their integrations. Or links to any stuff they might find useful when implementing any of our HeroThemes solutions.

Start with a README file (and build upon it)

With all that clear, now you’re ready for the writing part. The actual writing part of documentation starts with a README file. Think of it as the cover page or outline for your documentation. 

If you’re working on your code’s documentation that your (developer/tester/optimizer) colleagues will use, your README file will look a certain way. 

And if you’re writing customer-facing documentation, you might want to adapt it to make sense for the intended audience and the work it needs to get done. The content, though, remains the same more or less. Below, you can see how a support article explaining how an integration works start with a cover page thing of its own.

Now, just take your READMe file or your documentation’s outline and fill it out one section at a time. Here are a few resources from our blog to help you fill out your documentation:

• The Ultimate Knowledge Base Article Template (Infographic):  We dug into our customers’ most successful knowledge base articles and decoded how a good knowledge base article looks like. Such articles make up a significant part of your user-facing documentation, so use this infographic to create them at record speed.
• How to Write Thorough Step-By-Step Standard Operating Procedures (SOPs) : This is a quick how-to on writing how-tos or standard operating procedures that offer step-by-step instructions on how to complete the intended work — very useful when creating an internal company wiki or knowledge base.
• What Is Process Documentation? And How to Document Your Processes the Right Way : Another quick how-to on writing process documentation, an essential part of your internal company knowledge documentation mix. 
• How to Write Frequently Asked Questions  &  5 Simple Ways to Write the Perfect Answers to Your FAQs : These two posts will help you whip up your FAQs within an hour and deflect a lot of pre-sales queries like a boss.

Once done, don’t forget to add a reviewing and testing part.

Reviewing is an essential part of the documentation process. It helps you ensure that your documentation actually works. In his  five-step documentation reviewing process , technical writer Tom Johnson says that the first stage is unmissable where you — the documentation writer — make “the product work” for yourself following the steps you’ve written.

Documentation starts staling as soon as it’s published. So you need an update schedule.

Your update frequency will depend on the documentation you’re looking at. For instance, your user-facing documentation will need updates only when you update your product.

Developer-facing documentation — technical code documentation — is forever ongoing ( inline documentation).

Your internal knowledge/work documentation, on the other hand, could use updating each time something changes — for example, when you replace your current project management tool or even when you simply discover a more optimized way of doing some work. Tribal knowledge capturing and general knowledge capturing are some of the ongoing exercises in such documentation.

When it makes sense, maintain a change log in your documentation so that users don’t feel lost when they see an updated version.

Also, as part of updating your documentation, get rid of the obsolete and duplicate files. A search in your documentation should never return multiple versions of the same support content. Each topic should only take one resource. 

Wrapping it up…

Once you’ve finetuned this general guide on how to write documentation to suit your documentation workflow, document your documentation writing process

Doing so will help you not just standardize your documentation writing but also enable others to build upon it because documentation is always ongoing.

Over to you…  How do you currently approach writing documentation?

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How to write good documentation: home, documentation.

Why to Write Documentation

Documentation effectively connects humans and machines.

Why writing documentation is important:

• You will be using your code in 6 months
• You want people to use your code and give you credit
• You want to learn self-determination
• Others would be encouraged to contribute to your code
• Others can easily use your code and build upon it
• Advance the science
• Encourage open science 
• Allow reproducibility and transparency

What should you document about your research? Everything! All the data, notes, code, and materials someone else would need to reproduce your work.

Consider the following questions:

• How is your data gathered?
• What variables did you use?
• Did you use any code to clean/analyze your data?

Best Practices for Documenting Your Project

Best Practices for Writing Documentation:

• A brief description of the project
• Installation instructions
• A short example/tutorial
• Allow issue tracker for others
• What a function does
• What are the function's parameters or arguments are
• What a function returns
• Document your code
• Apply coding conventions, such as file organization, comments, naming conventions, programming practices, etc.
• Include information for contributors
• Include citation information
• Include licensing information
• Link to your e-mail address at the end
• List all the versions of the files along with the major edits you did in each version

An important tip: Naming files should be descriptive and consistent!

• Date format (ISO 8601 Standard): YYYYMMDDThhmmss
• Project or experiment name
• Researcher name/initials
• Date or date range of collection version

An example for README file.

An example of code documentation.

Tools for Documentation

Tools for Documentation:

• Doctest  
• R Markdown  
• Doxygen  - Doxygen can be used for C, C#, PHP, Java, Python, and Fortran.
• ​ BoostBook

Software Documentation Hosting Options:

• Read The Docs
• 18 Software Documentation Tools
• BIDS Docathon Kickoff - A Video
• Docathon at BIDS
• Documenting Your Code
• First Steps with Sphinx
• Google Style Guides
• How to maintain an open source project
• A Quick Guide to Software Licensing for the Scientist-Programmer

Library Data Services Program

• Last Updated: Nov 6, 2023 2:10 PM
• URL: https://guides.lib.berkeley.edu/how-to-write-good-documentation

A Guide to Writing Your First Software Documentation

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Why Documentation Is Important

Who software documentation is for, what to include in your documentation, things you need to pay attention to, extra tip and some popular examples, frequently asked questions (faqs) about writing software documentation.

As a developer, your pride and joy is your code. It’s readable, it meets DRY principles, it reflects best practices, and the end product is a great tool that solves some kind of problem for its target users. However, no matter how much work you’ve put into your code, if your software comes with no documentation, or you write documentation as an afterthought and treat it with little importance, it’s likely users will find little joy in working with it, and eventually opt for a different, more user-friendly product.

In this article, you’ll find a number of practical guiding principles to get you up and running with writing your first software documentation.

In reference to your software, Mike Pope has a fitting saying that goes like this: If it isn’t documented, it doesn’t exist .

Why’s that? Well, just to take my personal experience as an example, I was browsing the Web looking for new JavaScript animation libraries to try out and I came across one with a description of its features that I really liked. However, there was no documentation, not even a Getting Started section, but just a bare-bones API page with almost no explanations or examples. Do you think I ended up using that library? Of course, I didn’t. I got so frustrated with it that I moved on to something that made more sense to me.

To the question of why good JavaScript libraries fail , Nicholos Zakas gives the following answer :

Lack of documentation . No matter how wonderful your library is and how intelligent its design, if you’re the only one who understands it, it doesn’t do any good. Documentation means not just autogenerated API references, but also annotated examples and in-depth tutorials. You need all three to make sure your library can be easily adopted.

Another important reason why your software docs are crucially important is that they serve as a communication tool between your present self and your future self, and also between your present self and other developers who eventually might find themselves working on your software. Even if you write readable and commented code, this doesn’t necessarily mean it will still be clear to you in six months’ time why you wrote a function, or any other piece of your code for that matter, the way you did.

Documentation allows you to transfer the why behind code. Much in the same way code comments explain the why , and not the how , documentation serves the same purpose. — A Beginner’s Guide to Writing Documentation

Surely, you want people to use your code and also to be able eventually to update it and improve on it. These are all contributing factors to the growth of a supporting community behind your product, which is important for it to gain robustness, maturity, and success.

It’ll be mighty hard to accomplish all this if your software doesn’t have great docs to go with it.

When writing anything, make sure it’s clear in your mind who your audience is. Docs are no exception to this rule. Doing so clarifies in your head the problems your audience is likely to face, the familiarity it’s likely to have with your product or the prerequisites for using your product. This information is crucial to the way you create the content and the language you use.

There are two kinds of documentation this article is not concerned with:

• User manuals. For instance, my sister might decide to use WordPress for publishing her own blog. She’s not a developer, but she’s heard that non-devs can get their blog up and running in no time with WordPress. Now she’ll be needing instructions on how to download and configure the software on her server, how to write, publish, and update her posts, how to add images to a post, etc. In other words, she’ll need a user manual.
• Project documentation. This kind of documentation has more to do with the project than with the software itself, although some of its content could go in a project’s Readme file. To continue with the WordPress example, after getting lots of practice with WordPress, I might decide I’d like to add a feature to the software or fix a bug or two. In this case I’ll need to know things like changelogs, conventions and best practices, contribution policies, how to participate in team discussions relevant to the task at hand, etc.

The kind of documentation I’ve got in mind here is mainly aimed at developers who have different levels of familiarity with your software and need to use it in their projects. For instance, if I’m creating a WordPress theme, then I’ll need to know how to get started, how to include style sheets and JavaScript documents, how to communicate with the database to display posts, etc.

A popular approach is Readme Driven Development , championed by Tom Preston-Werner. It consists of writing the Readme document before you even start writing any code. This document is an introduction to your software and usually includes:

• an explanation of what your software does and what problem it solves
• an example illustrating the circumstances in which your code would normally be used
• links to the code and bugs tracker
• FAQs and ways to ask for support
• instructions on how to install your software
• license information

However, in my view, having a solid documentation that can really help developers who use your software/library should go well beyond the classical Readme file. Following Daniele Procida , I suggest you include the following items in your documentation material for a great user experience.

A beginner will love to find a tutorial in your software docs. Tutorials are about showing users how to complete a project using your software, so that they can quickly get a sense of what they can do with it.

Tutorials are lessons that take the reader by the hand through a series of steps to complete a project of some kind. They are what your project needs in order to show a beginner that they can achieve something with it. — Daniele Procida

How-to Guides

How-to guides help users solve a real-world task using your software. Procida compares them to recipes in the sense that they are directions you give users so that they can successfully reach a certain goal. Unlike tutorials, which are aimed at complete beginners, how-to guides assume users already possess some basic knowledge of features, tools, and of how to perform simple tasks.

Reference Guides

Reference guides are technical references of your software’s code — functions, APIs, etc. — and offer a basic description of how to use the software. For example, you’ll find an illustration of how to instantiate a specific class, how to call a particular method, and so on.

Reference guides are technical descriptions of the machinery and how to operate it. — Daniele Procida

This is the piece of documentation you’re likely to find in most projects. Developers tend to be quite good at writing it since they know all about their code and how to use it.

Explanation

Explanations are a deep dive into, or a discussion on, a particular topic you think is relevant to a higher-level understanding of your software. About explanations, Procida points out that —

This section of documentation is rarely explicitly created, and instead, snippets of explanation are scattered among other sections. Sometimes, the section exists, but has a name such as Background or Other notes and doesn’t really do justice to the function. A topic isn’t defined by a specific task you want to achieve, like a how-to guide, or what you want the user to learn, like a tutorial. It’s not defined by a piece of the machinery, like reference material. It’s defined by what you think is a reasonable area to try to cover at one time, so the division of topics for discussion can sometimes be a little arbitrary.

Let’s go through some useful pointers about making your docs user-friendly and relevant.

Make Your Docs Discoverable

It’s a good idea to put some work into making your software documentation easy to find. You could use some SEO techniques together with some marketing strategies so that as many users as possible can get hold of it.

Also, what you put in your docs should be organized into a structure that makes searching for specific information a breeze. Steve Konves recommends you structure your docs in a singly linked tree: starting from the root node, which should be placed in an obvious location for every interested user to discover, all other items can be easily accessed. The project’s Readme file lends itself to working really well as a great root node for the entire tree.

Also, if you receive help requests from your software’s users, you could write the answers and make them available in an easily accessible FAQs page. Doing so will decrease the time you spend helping users, but it will also give you a clearer idea of the kind of information users need most frequently so that you can document them first and keep them in a prominent place in your docs.

Ensure Your Docs Are Up-to-date and Free of Bugs

Easily accessing your software documentation is great, but if users find out that its content is out of date or the sample code or instructions lead to buggy results, this gets frustrating, to say the least. Still, Steve Konves suggests you keep your docs close to the code — for instance, in source control. This way, when developers update the code, they’ll notice the documentation material, which makes updating the docs a much more likely occurrence.

Also, to minimize the occurrence of bugs, thoroughly test the instructions and the code samples you provide in your docs.

Don’t stop at documentation. Blog posts are great for making your software and its features known to a wide audience of potential users. Use your blog to offer clarifications of what your product does, deliver user-friendly tutorials, tips and tricks, walk-throughs, explain updates, etc. You can include your blog in a stand-alone website dedicated to your software — perhaps with a forum — around which a strong community can gather and grow.

A great example of this wider idea of documentation in my view is implemented by GreenSock , a widely successful JS animation platform, which I find myself using a lot, not least because its website makes available easy-to-use and well-structured docs, a super helpful forum, blog posts, quick tips, and much more.

React and Vue.js can also be counted as great examples. As soon as you access their respective websites, the home page tells you what each library is good for in a quick tagline, and then goes into more details on why the library can be considered a great choice for your project. Both websites make getting started less intimidating using gentle introductions, illustrative snippets, short tasks beginners can accomplish using code playgrounds, etc. Once users have gained a bit of confidence with the new software, they can find the more technical API docs readily, plus pages detailing how to get help, displaying information on the ecosystem, offering a news or blog section, etc.

To leave the JS zone and go into the field of popular UI libraries with great websites, I can’t leave out Bootstrap . On the Bootstrap website you’ll find right away what the library is good for and how to get started quickly, as well as comprehensive and well-structured docs and a blog to keep users updated on what’s new.

Writing good documentation has its challenges, but it certainly pays off a hundred times if you think how much easier it will be for your users to implement your software’s capabilities. This in turn contributes to your software’s popularity, which makes it attractive and therefore open to the possibility of giving rise to a community of developers who are willing to invest their time in learning it deeply and contributing to its growth, stability, and long-term usage.

What are the key elements to consider when writing software documentation?

When writing software documentation, it’s crucial to consider the target audience, the purpose of the document, and the type of documentation being written. The language used should be clear, concise, and easy to understand. The document should be well-structured, with a logical flow of information. It’s also important to include visuals like diagrams or screenshots where necessary to aid understanding. Lastly, always ensure the document is thoroughly reviewed and edited for accuracy and clarity.

How can I make my software documentation user-friendly?

To make your software documentation user-friendly, use simple and clear language. Avoid jargon and technical terms as much as possible. If you must use them, ensure you provide clear definitions. Organize your content logically and use headings and subheadings to make it easy to navigate. Include a table of contents and an index for longer documents. Use visuals like diagrams, screenshots, and videos to illustrate complex concepts.

What are the different types of software documentation?

There are several types of software documentation, including system documentation, user documentation, and technical documentation. System documentation provides an overview of the software system, including its architecture and data flow. User documentation provides instructions on how to use the software and includes user manuals and help guides. Technical documentation is intended for developers and includes code comments, API documentation, and development guides.

How often should software documentation be updated?

Software documentation should be updated whenever there are significant changes to the software. This could be due to new features being added, existing features being modified, or bugs being fixed. It’s also a good idea to review the documentation periodically to ensure it’s still accurate and relevant.

What tools can I use to write software documentation?

There are many tools available for writing software documentation, including word processors, documentation generators, and specialized documentation tools. Some popular options include Microsoft Word, Google Docs, Doxygen, and Sphinx. The choice of tool depends on your specific needs and the complexity of the software.

How can I ensure the quality of my software documentation?

To ensure the quality of your software documentation, always review and edit your work thoroughly. Consider having a colleague or a professional editor review your document. Use a consistent style and format throughout the document. Ensure the information is accurate, up-to-date, and relevant. Lastly, consider getting feedback from users to identify areas for improvement.

What is the role of visuals in software documentation?

Visuals play a crucial role in software documentation. They can help illustrate complex concepts, making them easier to understand. They can also break up large blocks of text, making the document more readable. Examples of visuals include diagrams, screenshots, flowcharts, and videos.

How can I make my software documentation more engaging?

To make your software documentation more engaging, use a conversational tone and active voice. Break up large blocks of text with visuals and bullet points. Use examples and case studies to illustrate concepts. Include interactive elements like quizzes or exercises where appropriate.

What is the importance of consistency in software documentation?

Consistency is important in software documentation as it makes the document easier to read and understand. It also gives the document a professional look and feel. Consistency applies to language, style, format, and visuals.

How can I improve my skills in writing software documentation?

To improve your skills in writing software documentation, practice writing regularly. Read other software documentation to learn from them. Take courses or workshops on technical writing. Seek feedback on your work and be open to criticism. Stay updated with the latest trends and best practices in software documentation.

Maria Antonietta Perna is a teacher and technical writer. She enjoys tinkering with cool CSS standards and is curious about teaching approaches to front-end code. When not coding or writing for the web, she enjoys reading philosophy books, taking long walks, and appreciating good food.

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Creating effective technical documentation

Effective feature documentation is important in enhancing a user's experience with the feature. Good documentation is like a piece of the puzzle that makes everything click — the key for encouraging feature adoption.

To support you in creating effective technical documentation, this article provides an overview of the core principles of technical writing. It also highlights the best practices for creating clear and accessible documentation. Applying these technical writing principles helps us maintain the high quality of content on MDN. Whether you're documenting your own project or product or contributing to technical content in various settings, you can improve the quality of your work by following these best practices.

Adopt clarity, conciseness, and consistency

These three Cs form the core principles of technical writing. They can take you a long way in producing quality documentation.

For achieving clarity in your writing, apply the following guidelines:

• Use simple words and clear language. Keep in mind the audience, especially if it includes non-native English speakers.
• Be clear about who needs to perform the action. Writing in active voice is not strictly required. However, you should use it when you want to be clear about who needs to perform the action. For example, clarify whether a function is triggered by an event or if the user needs to explicitly call the function.
• Clearly introduce and explain new terms. This helps to lay the foundation for concepts that are covered later in the documentation.

Replace "it", "this", and "these" with proper nouns if they can refer to more than one thing in the given context.

• Aim for one idea per sentence to improve readability.
• Stick to one main idea per paragraph. Each sentence in a paragraph should logically connect to the one before it. Imagine if each sentence in a paragraph was a link in a chain. If you pick up the first link, the other links in the chain should follow, forming a continuous sequence. This is how the sentences should connect to each other, ensuring a seamless flow of a single idea.

Conciseness

Keep sentences short. This automatically increases the readability and clarity of your document. It also helps in quick comprehension. Long sentences can be more challenging to understand quickly due to their complex structures.

Based on common readability standards, aim for 15-20 words per sentence.

For additional insights on sentence length and readability strategies, see Simple sentences (on https://readabilityguidelines.co.uk ) and Popular readability formulas , including the Flesch-Kincaid index, on Wikipedia.

Consistency

Use the same terminology throughout your documentation to ensure a seamless reader experience. For example, if you start referring to "user agents" as browsers, stick with that term consistently. This avoids confusion that can arise from using words interchangeably, even when they share the same meaning.

Additionally, maintain consistent word casing and follow a uniform formatting style throughout your documentation. These practices not only enhance readability but also contribute to a professional presentation of your documentation.

Organize your content for maximum impact

Apply the same principles for organizing your content as you would for organizing your code: spend some time setting a clear goal and thinking about the desired structure for your documentation. Ensure that each subsection contributes to this goal incrementally.

Start with an introduction

In the introduction, first describe the feature you're documenting. Next, set the context by explaining why learning about the feature would be beneficial to the readers. This can include describing real-life scenarios where the feature can be useful. The more relevance you add to the topic, the easier it will be for readers to understand and engage with the content.

Progress logically

The following questions can help you ensure that your content is progressing logically:

• Is your document structured to guide readers from foundational concepts to more advanced ones? Are there sections to introduce the " what " to establish a base before delving into the " why " and " how "? Consider whether the document structure mirrors the natural learning path for the topic. Aligning the document's structure with the natural progression of learning helps readers build their knowledge step-by-step and also enhances the overall learning experience.
• Are there sufficient how-to guides or examples following the conceptual sections?
• Consider the flow of the content. Is it following a logical sequence — from one sentence to the next, from one paragraph to the next, and from one section to the next? Does each section logically build on the information presented previously, avoiding abrupt jumps or gaps in the content?

Additionally, as you work on the draft, always ask yourself:

• What reader questions am I addressing with this sentence?
• Can I add a simplistic or real-life use case to explain this concept?

Include examples

Imagine sitting next to someone as you explain the concepts to them. Preempt their questions and address them in your writing. Use this approach to add as many relevant examples as possible.

When adding examples, don't restrict yourself to only code; include non-code scenarios to demonstrate a feature's utility. This helps readers understand the concepts better and also caters to different learning styles. Consider providing real-world scenarios or use cases to illustrate how the feature or concept applies in practical situations.

Optimize the document structure and length

Evaluate your documentation's structure to ensure it maintains a logical and balanced hierarchy.

• Ensure that each section and subsection has a clear purpose and sufficient content.
• Look for instances where a main section contains only one subsection (orphan), such as a single H3 section under an H2 section. This indicates that you need to reorganize your content or make some additions.
• Check if there are lower-level headings such as H4 . Too many subsections can be overwhelming for readers, making it difficult for them to grasp the information. In such cases, consider presenting the content as a bulleted list instead to help readers retain the key points more effectively. This approach helps to simplify the hierarchy and also contributes to easier navigation.
• While there should be sufficient content for each section, pay attention to the overall length. If any section becomes too extensive, it can be overwhelming for readers. Split large sections into multiple logical subsections or restructure the content into new sections and subsections. Grouping content into digestible pieces helps maintain focus and improve navigation for readers.

Proofread your writing

One aspect that cannot be stressed enough is the importance of self-reviewing and proofreading what you've written. Whether you're creating a large document or a short paragraph, this step is crucial.

Taking the time to fully review your work will help you identify sections that don't flow well or can be improved for clarity. During self-review, aim to spot and remove redundancy (repetition of ideas without adding value) and repetitiveness (overuse of words or phrases). These refinements will ensure your documentation is clear and coherent and conveys your ideas as intended.

Proofread and then take a break before you review again. Only then submit your work. While spell checkers can flag spelling errors, they might not flag incorrect use of words, such as an unintended use of "he" instead of "the". It's best to take a break and return with fresh eyes to catch any errors you might have missed. Pay close attention to identify inconsistencies in tone, style, tense, or formatting and make the necessary adjustments.

Additional tips

To improve the clarity and accessibility of your documentation, also keep the following guidelines and tips in mind. To go in-depth into any of the topics, feel free to consult our Writing style guide .

• Bulleted vs numbered lists : Lists, in general, make documentation easier to scan. Use bulleted lists when there is no specific order of the items. Use numbered lists when the steps need to be followed in the specific order. Always include a lead-sentence before beginning a list to provide context.
• Commas : Use a comma after an introductory clause to improve readability and to clarify the sentence structure. Use a comma to separate items in a list to ensure clarity.
• Alt text : Always provide an alternative text for the images you add to content. This makes your documentation accessible to people using screen readers. In addition to images, ensure that video and audio files have accompanying descriptive texts.
• Descriptive link text : Make sure each link text is clear even out of context and clearly indicates where the link leads. Descriptive link texts also help people using screen readers understand the destination of links. For example, use "Read our writing style guide to learn more" instead of "Click here to learn more".
• Inclusive language : Make your documentation welcoming to everyone. Strive to use words that respect and acknowledge the diversity of your audience.

That's it for this article. I hope you found these tips helpful as a quick refresher on technical writing best practices. Remember that learning how to create effective and easy-to-use documentation is an ongoing process. It starts with understanding your audience and the goals of your documentation. By applying these technical writing principles and tips, you'll certainly be able to enhance the clarity and overall quality of your documentation.

Let me know if you learned something new or if there's any idea that resonated with you. I'd also like to hear if there are any best practices you use in your technical documentation workflow. Share with us on Mastodon or Discord .

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The eight rules of good documentation

Like good code, good documentation is difficult and time consuming to write.

Imagine for a moment two common scenarios in the life of a web developer.

In the first scenario, meet Harlow. Today is Harlow’s first day on a new project. The team has a well-established codebase, a great working environment, and a robust test suite. As Harlow sits down at her desk, she’s excited to get up to speed with the team. After the morning stand-up meeting she’s pointed to the project’s documentation for installation with a slight grimace from her colleague Riley. He mentions that the docs “might be a little out of date, but should hopefully be enough to get you going.” Harlow then spends the rest of the day following the documentation until she gets stuck, at which point she is forced to dig through code or ask colleagues for guidance. What might have taken a few minutes becomes a day-long exercise in frustration, tampering Harlow’s initial excitement.

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In the second scenario, meet Harrison. He’s working on a web app and finds a library that, at first glance, seems incredibly useful for his project. As he attempts to integrate it with his codebase he discovers that parts of the API seem to be glossed over in the documentation or even undocumented. In the end, he walks away from the project in favor of another solution.

Though these scenarios may be slightly exaggerated, I’m reasonably certain that many of us can relate. These problems were not primarily caused by low-quality code, but rather by poor documentation.

If useful documentation is so important to the success of projects and developer well-being, why don’t all projects have it? The answer, I believe, is that like good code, good documentation is difficult and time consuming to write.

In my eyes, there are eight rules that we can follow to produce good documentation:

• Write documentation that is inviting and clear
• Write documentation that is comprehensive, detailing all aspects of the project
• Write documentation that is skimmable
• Write documentation that offers examples of how to use the software
• Write documentation that has repetition, when useful
• Write documentation that is up-to-date
• Write documentation that is easy to contribute to
• Write documentation that is easy to find

The most important rule of good documentation is for it to be as inviting as possible . This means that we should aim to write it in the clearest terms possible without skipping over any steps. We should avoid making assumptions about what our users may know. Sometimes this can seem to be overkill, and we may be tempted to say something like “every X developer knows about Y,” but we each bring our own background and set of experiences to a project. Though this may result in more verbose documentation, it is ultimately simpler, as there is less guesswork involved for developers with all levels of experience.

Documentation should aim to be comprehensive . This means that all aspects of the project are documented. Undocumented features or exceptions can lead to frustration and become a time suck as users and other developers are forced to read through code to find the answers they need. Fully documenting all features takes away this kind of ambiguity.

When we write documentation that is skimmable , we help users find the content they need quickly. Making documentation skimmable can be accomplished by using clear headings, bulleted lists, and links. For large project documentation, a table of contents or clear navigation will help users to skip straight to what they need, rather than scrolling through a single long document.

Documentation that features examples allows users to see how they might use the code themselves. Aim to provide examples of the most common use cases for the project, while letting the comprehensive documentation detail every possibility.

It is perfectly acceptable to include some repetition in documentation, which the Write the Docs project terms “ARID” (accepts (some) repetition in documentation). Doing so acknowledges that users may not read the full docs or that some information is relevant in multiple places in the documentation. While good code may be DRY, good writing aims to be clear, and sometimes this means repeating ourselves. The Write the Docs project calls out the difference between writing that is ARID, DRY, and WET in this way:

The pursuit of minimizing repetition remains valiant! ARID does not mean WET , hence the word choice. It means: try to keep things as DRY as possible, but also recognize that you’ll inevitably need some amount of “moisture” to produce documentation.

Effective documentation is kept up-to-date . This is surprisingly challenging. We may begin our project with the best of intentions and great documentation, but as our software evolves and we are quickly iterating, it can be easy to fall out of step. If you are working as part of an agile development team, I recommend adding documentation to your team’s “definition of done.” For independent projects, try to treat documentation as an important final step.

Documentation that is easy to contribute to is also easy to keep up-to-date. The simplest way to make documentation easy to contribute to is to treat it as code, storing it as text in source control. The site and book Docs Like Code advocates for treating our docs like our code by using source control, automating builds, and applying software development tools and techniques to our documentation practices.

Documentation is only as helpful as it is easy to find . Keeping an updated README file and linking to more extensive documentation at the top of the README when necessary helps to keep discoverability simple.

I hope these guidelines are useful as you draft your project’s documentation. Sometimes it is helpful to remember that documentation isn’t just for other developers, but often for our future selves as well. When we return to a project after a number of months, we will appreciate the work we put into clear and up-to-date documentation.

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How to Write Good Documentation

In this article, I'll discuss the secret to never forgetting how your project works, in three steps.

If you’ve ever half-written a software project before taking a few days off, this is the article you’ll discover you needed when you reopen that IDE.

In the technology teams I lead, we make a constant effort to document all the things. Documentation lives alongside the code as an equal player.

This helps ensure that no one needs to make assumptions about how something works, or is calling lengthy meetings to gain working knowledge of a feature. Good documentation saves us a lot of time and hassle.

That said, and contrary to popular belief, the most valuable software documentation is not primarily written for other people. As I said in this well-received tweet:

The secret to good documentation is to write it while you're writing the code. You are your first audience. Explain what you're doing to yourself. Future you will thank you!

— Victoria Drake November 24, 2020

Here are three concrete steps you can take to write good documentation before it’s too late.

1. Start with accurate notes

As you work out ideas in code, ensure you don’t soon forget important details by starting with accurate notes. While you will want to explain things to yourself in long-form later, short-form notes will suffice to capture details without interrupting your coding session flow.

Keep a document open alongside your code and write down things like commands, decisions, and sources you use. This can include:

• Terminal commands you typed in
• Why you chose a particular method over another
• Links you visited for help or cough copy-paste cough inspiration
• The order in which you did things

Don’t worry about full sentences at this point. Just ensure you accurately capture context, relevant code snippets, and helpful URLs. It can also be helpful to turn on any auto-save option available.

2. Explain decisions in long form

The ideal time to tackle this step is when you take a break from coding, but before you completely go out to lunch on whatever it is you’re working on at the moment.

You want to ensure that context, ideas, and decisions are all still fresh in your mind when you explain them to yourself.

Go over the short-form notes you took and start expanding them into conversational writing. Be your own rubber duck. Describe what you’re doing as if you were teaching it to someone else. You might cover topics such as:

• Quirky-looking decisions: “I would normally do it this way, but I chose to do something different because…”
• Challenges you ran into and how you overcame them
• Architectural decisions that support your project goals

Stick to the main points. Long-form writing doesn’t mean you’ll be paid by the word! Just use full sentences, and write as if explaining your project to a colleague. You’re explaining to future you, after all.

3. Don’t neglect prerequisite knowledge

This step is best done after a long lunch break, or even the next day (but probably not two). Re-read your document and fill in any blanks that become apparent after putting some distance between yourself and the project.

Take extra care to fill in or at least link to prerequisite knowledge, especially if you frequently use different languages or tools. Even an action as small as pasting in a link to the API documentation you used can save hours of future searching.

Write down or link to READMEs, installation steps, and relevant support issues. For frequently performed command-line actions, you can use a self-documenting Makefile to avoid having to man common tasks each time you come back to a project.

It’s easy to forget supporting details after even just a short break from your project. Capture anything you found helpful this time around.

Document all the things!

The next time you catch yourself thinking, “I’m sure I’ll remember this part, no need to write it down,” just recall this emoji: 🤦‍♀️

Software projects are made up of a lot more than just their code. To best set up your future self for success, document all the things! Whether it’s a process you’ve established, Infrastructure as Code, or a fleeting future roadmap idea — write it down! Future you will thank you for it.

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Director of Engineering. I 💜 cybersecurity and developing teams. Core maintainer, OWASP Web Security Testing Guide. 👉 https://victoria.dev

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Documentation is written data or instructions that outline a certain problem statement, approaches, functionality, workflow, architecture, challenges, and development process. Documentations can be used to gain a comprehensive understanding of the solution’s functionality, installation, and configurations at once.

Writing good documentation holds immense significance in the world of software development. In this article, you will get the significance of a documentation process and 10 tips and best practices to write better documentation. This article will also touch upon recommended tools and websites for creating good documentation. 

Now, before getting into the tips and tools let us first know the importance of clear documentation for a software development cycle, 

Importance of a Good Documentation

Here are some points to debate, the importance of writing good documentation,

• You are Your First Audience : Contrary to popular belief, documentation is not primarily written for other people. It’s for ourselves to know what we’ve done previously, which helps us catch on to the exact mindset and thoughts while we are developing them.
• Increase in Productivity : Well-documented programs allow team members to collaborate efficiently, reducing the time a team spends figuring out how to perform tasks and making them follow the established workflows.
• Clarity and Understanding : Documentation gives us the power to review the function and logic of a particular piece of code. So, that it could help both you and others to understand the implementation details which makes it easier to maintain or debug the program.
• Knowledge Transfer and Onboarding : In a company, documentations play a valuable role as it can cut down hours of knowledge transfer for new team members or developers joining the project.
• Enhances Code Reviews: Documentation will make the code review process simpler and more efficient because the reviewer can simply go through the documentation to check the logic and implementation.

How to Write Better Documentation – 10 Best Practices

Now, let’s see how to write good documentation and what practices you should follow to write high-quality documentation. Here, we have explained a small problem to create an API (API that returns unique cat images on every call) wherever it’s necessary. 

1. Start with the Problem You are Trying to Solve

Explaining the problem is like setting up the stage, and understanding the problem before developing a solution. This gives us a deep understanding of the problem itself and writing them down will consciously open up the possibilities to develop an efficient solution. Clearly defining and articulating the problem helps you identify the root cause of the problem and its potential implications. It also helps to communicate the problem with others, such as team members, reviewers, and other potential readers of the documentation.

Here is the comparison of articulating the problem in a good way and a bad way,

2. Know Your Readers

When it comes to writing good documentation, one of the key things we need to consider is understanding who your readers are, and writing accordingly. Just like a skilled writer tailors his work to their intended audience, it is very important for a developer to write the documentation by understanding the reader’s potential. One of the ways we can do that is by using certain languages and terminologies which will be easily understandable and graspable by the readers. 

For example, your reader can be a project manager or a stakeholder, or another fellow developer. The level of detail of the documentation should be easily adaptable by the intended readers.

3. Document Your Decisions Going Forward

The ideal time to use this tip is when you are going to take a break from coding, but you need to make sure that you remember the flow of your project. For example, the logic, design, and architectural decisions you make. It is crucial to track the decisions or choices made by you in the past while capturing the journey of the particular development. This will greatly help you to catch on to the exact mindset or state after your break. The decisions need to be tracked with suitable justifications (Why you made the choice?). Here is an example of that,

“Decision: We opted to integrate a PostgreSQL database for efficient data storage. Justification: PostgreSQL emerged as the ideal choice due to its robust reliability, scalability, and extensive set of features. The database’s ACID compliance guarantees utmost data consistency and integrity, a paramount aspect for the success of our project. Additionally, PostgreSQL’s exceptional support for advanced querying capabilities and its extensibility empower us to seamlessly handle and analyze vast volumes of data.”

4. Document Important points

Documenting important points refer to tracking all the reference links, documentation, and research sources so that it is easier for the developers to access the resources quickly and easily rather than searching for specific documentation or resource for a long time. This can save hours of time if implemented properly. We have to emphasize more on preserving the vital details for future reference as it has the ability to save a lot of time on developing, maintaining, and even updating the version of the particular code.

“ IMPORTANT LINKS: fastAPI Documentation: https://fastapi.tiangolo.com/ Postgresql – Python documentation: https://www.postgresqltutorial.com/postgresql-python/ ”

5. Keep it Simple, Clear, and Self-Explanatory

Documentations should be easily understandable by the readers. We have to explain the functionality and logic used to build a module very clearly, which helps in further development, maintenance, and upgradation of the module. We have to keep the documentation as clean and organized as possible. Making the documentation itself self-explanatory is crucial. While documenting a complex part of the program it is recommended to add sample codes to the documentation and really try to break down the code and make it clear for the readers is vital. As we have discussed earlier your documentation is going to reach a wide range of people so, it is very important that your choices of words and structure of the documentation be clear and display a sense of clarity to the reader.

6. Documenting is a Shared Responsibility

Creating and maintaining documentation should not be a sole responsibility. The effort to create documentation should be crowdsourced for a number of reasons, Primarily, to distribute the workload of an employee this allows all the other contributors to show a sense of ownership towards the project.  Involving contributors from different departments or domains will allow us to create holistic and well-rounded documentation.

For example, A developer may contribute to the technical insights in the documentation while the business stakeholders provide the goals and future aspects of the project. Overall, crowdsourcing the documentation effort allows you to tap into your team’s collective knowledge and expertise, resulting in more extensive, accurate, and widely acknowledged documentation.

7. Follow a Uniform Format

We need to follow similar formatting techniques throughout the whole documentation to make sure it is easily understandable and it allows the readers to easily navigate the content and get useful insights efficiently. We have to properly format the document using headings, sub-headings, points, and tables if necessary. These allow us to maintain the readability of the documentation.  By adhering to a uniform format, we can able to create cohesive and user-friendly documentation. For example,

Modules of API:

• Authentication Module
• Image retriever Module
• Request & Response Module
• Utility Module

Authentication module

# about the authentication module

Image Retriever Module

# about image retrieval module

8. Add Diagrams and Visuals

Including diagrams and visuals in the documentation can greatly improve the understanding and engagement of the readers. It is easier to explain complex logic and implementations visually. Visual representations like diagrams, flowcharts, and graphs help to illustrate processes, systems, or data in a clear and concise manner. Visual representations like these serve as a universal language that can overcome the barriers like language proficiency or technical expertise. While incorporating diagrams make sure to add clear and concise labeling and maintain consistency to avoid unnecessary confusion for the readers. Always keep in mind that graphics should enhance written content rather than completely replace it. They should be used sparingly, with a focus on more efficiently communicating complicated or significant information. For example

9. Start the Documentation Work Alongside Development

Often people write the documentation after the development phase which is a common misconception and a bad practice, this not only makes the documentation phase more complex but it also leads to a lot of wrong information in the documentation. In this case, it becomes challenging to recall important information and details of the development phase. Furthermore, the creation of documentation post-development increases the potential for misconceptions and misunderstandings to proliferate. Without real-time documentation, developers may resort to personal interpretations or assumptions, resulting in inconsistencies between the actual implementation and the documented information.

10. Review Your Work at the End

Finally, in the end, the process of writing documentation involves reviewing the documentation thoroughly. Till now we would have not worked on the documentation continuously because we would have been involved in development and documentation to and forth, which makes this a vital part of creating documentation. There is a possibility that our documentation lacks the structure it needs. Finally, tweaking some things and restructuring the documentation can make it a well-formatted and comparatively better documentation.

Tools and Websites For Creating Documentation

When it comes to creating clear and self-explaining documentation, different tools and formats can be used depending on your audience and the purpose of the documentation. 

Here are some of the websites people in the industry use in common:

• GitBook – Free and easy-to-maintain versions of documentation
• Read the docs – More complex setup, good for technical documentation 
• Document360 – Expensive but covers all the necessary features

To Create Diagrams and Flowcharts, you can use:

• Microsoft Visio

In conclusion, every developer should have a firm grasp of the craft of writing documentation. You can enhance the caliber, precision, and efficacy of your documentation by paying attention to the ten suggestions offered in this article. Keep in mind that documentation is a useful tool that improves productivity, cooperation, and knowledge transfer rather than merely being an afterthought or a routine task. So, start your road to being a master documenter while embracing the humor and obstacles.

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How to Build the Best User Manual

Marketing Content Strategist

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What is a user manual, what are the different types of user manual, why does your business need user manuals, what are the essential elements of great user manuals, how to create a user manual, user manual faqs, subscribe to techsmith’s newsletter.

We all know that person that instinctively tosses the user manual out with the packaging without so much as a second glance. Some of us are that person. However, if you follow the process laid out in this blog, the user manuals you create will turn those user guide tossers into devoted readers in no time.

It’s important to note that, although you are required by law in some industries to create and distribute user manuals for your products, compliance isn’t the only reason that you should creating these important communication tools. 

When written and created with intention, a user’s manual can act as an extension of the customer service experience, and save your company time and money by reducing the amount of support inquiries that users have to make. 

In this article, we’ll look at what a user manual is, explore the various types you can create, and lay out exactly how to write user guides that your users are eager to put to good use.

A user manual goes by many names. You may hear terms like instruction manual, user guide, maintenance manual, or technical documentation but they all mean the same thing. A user manual is designed for an end user to use your product or service properly or to find solutions to problems that arise through use. They can be provided in either print or digital format or both!

Use manuals contain detailed, step-by-step instructions for the end user and also allow for some support in troubleshooting. They are not meant to be read from cover to cover, but as reference books, so a table of contents should always be included in a user manual. 

A quickstart or startup guide should be included in your user guide so that people can easily feel comfortable beginning to use the product. 

User manuals can be created for many topics and purposes. Let’s take a look at some of the options you have to choose from. 

1. Instruction Manual

An instruction manual is a type of user guide that provides basic instructions for how to use a product in its intended way. 

2. Training Manual

This type of user manual provides a set of instructions related to the completion of a specific task, project or job.

3. Service Manual

User manuals that outline how to care for and maintain a piece of equipment or machinery at various points in its life are referred to as service manuals.

4. User Manual

User manuals are technical documents that communicate about the proper use or operation of a product. 

5. Operation Manual

Operation manuals outline the roles, responsibilities and processes pertaining to a company or organization. 

6. Organizational Policy Manual

The documentation outlining a company’s policies, procedures and best practices is called an organizational policy manual.

7. Standard Operating Procedures(SOPs) Manual

A standard operating procedures manual helps users by outlining specific instructions for completing established procedures. 

Easily create a user guide

Snagit is the fastest way to create beautiful user guides. Create step-by-step guides with a simple and professional look

A user manual equips people to solve problems without having to seek outside help. In our instant gratification driven society, it is important to provide your patrons with the tools to quickly and efficiently get the benefit they want from your product or service, and a good user manual can accomplish just that! 

User guides are a much-needed supplement to excellent customer service. Some of the benefits your business will see from writing great user manuals include:

1. To Simplify Onboarding and Training

Well crafted user manuals can simplify your onboarding and training processes. That’s right, your employees can benefit just as much as your customers from the creation and implementation of excellent user guides. 

Instead of exclusively organizing complicated in-person training sessions, which carry high costs in both time and money, your business can utilize user manuals to help new employees work through some of the processes and systems that are part of their new jobs. This can mean that there are fewer productive hours lost during onboarding, as employees are able to learn while completing the tasks associated with their jobs thanks to the user manuals.

2. To Decrease Support Costs

User manuals are an excellent supplement to your customer service experience for the end user but they are also beneficial for the business owner as a part of the customer support system as well. 

By providing easy access to a searchable user guide for your customers you increase their ability to access solutions in the moment and reduce the necessity to reach out for specific support from a technician or representative.  

3. To Save Time

User guides help save time for your customers as well as your employees – from entry-level to management. When user guides are accessible to your customers they will not suffer the frustration of time wasted searching for details about how to use a product – because they have direct and immediate access to the details within the user guide.

When your employees are empowered with effective user guides they don’t have to waste time searching for answers independently or taking up their colleagues’ and supervisors’ time with questions – because they have access to the answers right in their user manual!

4. To Reduce Liability

Writing and distributing user manuals is one way to help illustrate that you have done your due diligence in testing your product and how best to interact with it safely. This can go a long way in reducing any liabilities associated with creating something for the public.  

If the product you sell could pose a danger to users (think space heaters, power tools, etc…) having warnings and safety precautions documented and available to users by way of a user guide is an effective (though not foolproof) way to avoid legal trouble associated with injures or other damage caused by misuse. 

Even though each product is unique and will require different elements to create truly great user docs, there are some end user documentation best practices to follow no matter what.

1. Plain language

Aside from not providing a user manual, nothing will make your customers more frustrated than finding theirs full of jargon and inaccessible language. These language choices make your user guides difficult to use and they certainly don’t foster an excellent customer service experience. 

An important part of writing effective user manuals is making sure you are writing for the user, not the developer. Don’t make assumptions about what your end user might know or be familiar with. Using acronyms, buzzwords, or slang used around the office will leave your customers feeling confused, frustrated, and ill-equipped.

Striking a balance where you are not writing as if your users are children (unless of course, they are!) but you are giving them the extra support that they need to fully understand how to use the product, in simple language, is the sweet spot for writing a user manual.

2. Simplicity

Simplicity is the name of the game when writing a user manual. Both the content and the design should adhere to this idea. Crowding your documentation with complicated illustrations, and dense blocks of text will give the sense that the user guide is too complex and inaccessible. 

This type of user guide has a high likelihood of intimidating your user and causing them to call your support line instead of attempting to solve their problem independently. 

“Show, don’t tell” is a key philosophy in writing user manuals. Content like images, videos , and annotated screenshots go a long way in helping to understand a concept. Seeing how something works is often much more effective than reading about how something works. 

Not only do visuals break up long blocks of text, but they also eliminate some of the bulk of text that can make user manuals intimidating. 

Visuals are actually proven to absorb visual information 7% faster than written information. In a study completed by Techsmith, it was also discovered that 67% of individuals were able to complete tasks better when provided instructions that used annotated screenshots to convey information rather than text alone.

4. Focus on the problem to be solved

Your product was almost certainly purchased to solve a problem. When writing the user guide to accompany the product it is crucial to maintain focus on this problem. 

Rather than listing and describing each feature your product has, or the interesting design details you’ve integrated, let your users know about them in a way that supports their use of the product. Frame your description of features and product perks in the context of the problem being solved.  

5. Logical hierarchy and flow

Use a clear hierarchical structure of headings and subheadings to help the user understand what they will get out of each section of your user manual. The hierarchy you use should follow a logical flow to guide your customers easily through exactly what they need to know from beginning to end. 

Make sure to begin with the basics and build in a logical progression toward the more advanced features of your product. 

6. Table of contents

Your user manual will serve its readers best when it starts with a table of contents. 

It’s a familiar way for someone to efficiently and simply navigate a document without having to sift through pages and pages of information that isn’t relevant to the immediate challenge they are experiencing.  

7. Make it searchable

While you may create print copies of your user manuals, it is likely that your primary focus will be digital documentation.  In a world where most people carry a smartphone on them at all times it is highly probable that your user guides will be most widely used in a digital format. 

Like a table of contents helps to direct users to the appropriate place in a print document, adding a searchable component to your digital user manuals will support an enjoyable ease of use for users trying to solve a problem by accessing it. 

8. Accessibility

It is not unlikely that a percentage of the individuals who need your user manual could use additional support in having it perform optimally.  Accessibility requirements are law in many places, and good practice regardless of the legal obligation behind them. 

Ensuring that your user manuals adhere to accessibility standards is simply good customer service. Creating accessible content for users who may have visual impairments, hearing impairments, or cognitive disabilities is an important factor in designing user manuals. 

9. Good design

Design your user manuals with your customers in mind. If you create something that they enjoy looking at they will be much more likely to use it well! 

Allow for lots of white space and avoid long blocks of text. Pairing these two qualities can help reduce the potential for intimidating users and make the prospect of learning something new inviting rather than daunting. 

Adhering to the “show don’t tell” philosophy we discussed earlier works well here too! Using graphics and images to supplement text is a great option for either print or digital user manuals, with videos and GIFs adding interest and a supportive element to digital user guides. 

If your organization has a style guide your design should adhere to it, but if you are working without one it is important to maintain consistency throughout your user guide.  Font and color choices should remain consistent throughout the document, and ideally between all of your user manuals.  You can use Snagit to help maintain consistency in your user guides by accessing the free templates it offers! Grab your free trial here to test it out.

10. Feedback from real users and/or beta testers

Unless you have asked for and listened to feedback from the individuals who will actually be using your product about the user manuals you have written, you won’t have an accurate sense of whether or not they are as effective as possible.  

You need to learn the pain points of your product’s users and make sure they are addressed in the user manuals you write. You may get some intel that seems very obvious but the opportunity is much greater for you to gain significant insight into the needs of the consumers you are striving to serve.  

11. Links to other documentation

It’s important that your user manuals offer opportunities for those reading them to easily access more information about your products. 

If your user manual is beng written for digital distribution you can add these links in through tutorials, FAQ sections, and user forums, among other options.

With physical copies of user documentation, these links can look like web addresses or phone numbers that readers can use to access more information.

Creating a user manual is an important undertaking and can make a significant impact in your business and for the users you are looking to serve. It can be overwhelming but we’ve broken down the process of writing a user manual so you can simply follow along!

1. Identify the users

Like any piece of communication you create, a crucial first step is identifying the person who will be on the receiving end.  

Identifying the user for your user manual will help you make good decisions about things like the tone, the amount of detail to include, and how to present the content.  

Writing a user guide for a tech developer is done very differently than writing one for your product’s end user. Identifying your audience is a make-it-or-break-it step.

2. Focus on the problem

User manuals are created to assist in solving a problem, or teaching someone to do something new.  It is necessary to identify exactly what your user manual is meant to accomplish and ensure that you keep your focus there.  

It can become tempting to expand the subject matter and cover many aspects of or potential uses for your product. This can cloud the actual solution that the user is in need of and cause frustration or calls to your customer service line. 

Focus on the specific solution your customer will need to have, whether they are an individual learning to use the product or a technician needing to repair it.

3. Use sequential steps in order

The instructions in your user guide should be presented in the sequential order required to complete the task at hand. Begin by listing each step in order.  Then, attempt to complete the task while following the specific steps you have laid out in the order presented.  

It is possible, likely even, that you will identify missing steps as you work through your initial list.  You may also discover that something you thought was one task actually needs to be broken down into a few tasks for the sake of clarity.  

Before you check this step off in your journey to write a user guide, make sure that you have provided a clear end result for each sequential step you have assigned. The readers should know exactly what they are looking to have completed and what it should look like the before moving on to the next step. 

4. Map user journey

The goal in writing a user guide is to understand how your customers intend to use your product and creating a way for them to easily do just that. 

You need to put in the work to understand the problem the user has or the goal they hope to reach in using your product as well as how they interact with your brand. These details will help you imagine the customer’s journey from problem to solution and map out the steps needed to get them through the process. 

5. Choose a Template

Developing a set of templates can make the job of writing and designing user guides significantly easier than you might think! It can streamline your process and make consistency a much more achievable goal.  

In addition to setting specifics like fonts (type and size), contrast requirements, and colorways, you’ll want to include the following in your user manual template:

• Assigned space for an introduction
• Clear sections and subsections
• Your selected format for sharing sequential steps
• Warnings and highlighted cautionings
• Assigned space for a conclusion

6. Write simple and easy to follow content

The content of your user manual should be as simple and easy to follow as possible. Both the content and format need to be considered and reviewed for simplicity and ease.

Make sure that each step of the process explains only one task and uses language that is as concise and clear as possible.  Be sure to edit down your content as thoroughly as possible until you have arrived at a user manual with only the most essential information included. 

7. Treat all users as laymen

When writing a user manual, assume that the reader knows nothing about your product. Write as if you are communicating with a layman.  

All technical language and jargon should be avoided wherever possible. Of course there are occasions where it will be unavoidable but these should be the extreme exception.

8. Test instructions alongside the product using naive users

An important step in the process of writing a user manual is the testing. The choice of who to test on can change the results dramatically. 

Ideally, testing should be performed on individuals who have never used your product or viewed the manual before. Observe them working through the process and make note of where they get stuck as they progress through the user manual. The material should then be revised accordingly. 

Your testers should be able to navigate the use of the product with only the support of the user manual. They should not need to reach out for additional support. Everything they need should be in the ussr guide itself.  

9. Build content using a practical approach

Practical examples and specific explanations of results that users might have after completing each step in the user manual should be included wherever possible. The user should know what feedback they may receive from the product; what they might see or here at any step of the process.  

10. Explain symbols, icons and codes early

As you write a user manual you may need to use icons, symbols or codes to help give the instructions needed. It is important to define these as early as possible in your user manual in order to avoid any confusion or frustration on behalf of the reader. 

User documentation is content in the form of user manuals or user guides which serves to help end users successfully interact with a product.

User documentation has historically been provided as physical documentation, like booklets or manuals. Nowadays, user manuals are more frequently created and distributed digitally.

A user manual or user guide is written in plain language, with a focus on problem solving, and utilizes good design. I should contain a table of contents, follow a logical hierarchy and flow, and provide accessible content. A good user manual will also be searchable and be influenced by feedback collected from real users. 

User manuals can be created in a few simple steps. First the goals of the user guide need to be established and a plan created that will allow those goals to be reached. Before being released, the user manual needs to be tested and have revisions made accordingly. Finally, the user guide should be kept up to date, with revisions being made as updates or new editions are incorporated.

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User Documentation Guide: Expert tips, Best Practices and Examples

Category: Technical Documentation

Last updated on May 23, 2024

If you sell products to customers, you will likely have heard of user documentation. 

Customers are always going to need help, and user documentation is one of the best ways to provide this assistance. 

Without documentation, customers are left to fumble in the dark, or else to contact your support team. 

And the likelihood is, if they have to reach out to a human for support, many customers won’t bother. They’ll just abandon your product instead, maybe asking for a refund, and that outcome is not good for anyone. 

Offering user documentation means you’re enabling your customers to self-serve. Whenever they have a question about your product, they can consult your online knowledge base for answers. 

User documentation is what your customers want. According to Forrester, 70% of customers prefer to use the company’s website to get answers to their questions rather than using the phone or email. 

However unclear or confusing user documentation makes customers angry , throws doubt on the quality of the rest of the product, and negatively impacts future purchases with the company. The stakes are high when it comes to delivering valuable user documentation for your customers. 

Table of Contents

What is user documentation, benefits of user documentation, tips to make your user documentation stand out, 1. stripe docs, 2. whatfix docs, 3. ahrefs docs, 4. microsoft docs, 5. twilio docs, 6. canva developer docs, 7. netflix help guide.

User documentation is the guide that aims to optimize the end user’s experience by providing detailed insights into utilizing every feature of the product or service. Also known as user guides, instruction manuals, or user manuals , user documentation is there to hold your customer’s hand as they learn about your product.

User documentation can be delivered to customers through a variety of different mediums. It could be an online knowledge base , printed manual, or video tutorials. It’s up to you to decide what best suits your customers and offer the format that is most useful to them. 

Providing helpful user documentation could make or break the customer experience. It helps customers get the most out of your product or service and offers a viable alternative to contacting the customer support team. 

Make easy onboarding for new users

For any new user of a product, there is always a learning curve. No product is so intuitive that customers can instantly understand all of its features and use cases. 

New users are much more likely to successfully onboard with your product if you provide them with informative user documentation. They can spend time browsing the docs and learning how the product works. 

It’s all about creating a positive customer experience after the sale. 86% of customers said they would be more likely to stay loyal to a business if the business invested in onboarding content that welcomes and educates customers after they’ve bought the product. 

Reduce customer support cost

When customers have user documentation to rely on, this results in fewer calls and emails to your customer support team. Lightening the load on the customer support team means costs are lowered and you can help more customers with fewer agents. 

Once it’s up and running, user documentation costs virtually nothing to maintain. The cost of a self-service interaction is measured in pennies while a live customer support interaction can cost up to $12. 

Agents are freed from dealing with mundane, repetitive queries and have more time to help those customers who need it. And when you have user documentation available, support agents can just point customers to relevant articles, and significantly shorten the time it takes to resolve their issue. 

Read more: Customer Service Knowledge Base Proven to Reduce Your Support Tickets

Improve customer satisfaction

User documentation makes your product easier to use and raises customer satisfaction. When you provide customers with a method of helping themselves to get out of trouble, you’re really enhancing the customer experience. 

Instead of abandoning your customers or forcing them to call your support team, you’re empowering them to solve problems on their own. User documentation is the most basic form of support that customers expect, and if they don’t find it – or it’s not of sufficient quality – they will be disappointed. 

70% of customers now expect a company’s website to include a self-service application. Self-service documentation is the gold standard. 

Documented user guides will reduce liability against the wrong usage

If you don’t warn customers against incorrect usage, this might result in a dangerous application of your product and physical harm to your customers. Your company is legally obligated to provide warnings for customers’ health and safety. 

When you document your product properly this can guard against customers using it wrongly. If you provide adequate warnings against incorrect ways to use your products then this means your company is less likely to become the recipient of legal action.

Better sales collaterals

When prospective customers have access to your user documentation they can find out more in-depth about how your product works, and this can help them in their purchasing decision. It also creates a good impression for customers because it shows that you will support them after the sale. 

Even better, when having conversations with your customers your sales team can refer to the documentation. This helps sales reps have more meaningful conversations with customers about the product and improves the likelihood that customers will buy.

Documenting, storing, and sharing technical manuals made easy.

Here we’ll go through some useful tips that will level up your user documentation and ensure that you are helping your customers. 

Understand your target audience

First and foremost, you should understand who you’re writing for. 

• Who is your customer? 
• What are their needs?
• What problems are they trying to solve? 

You need to have a clear picture of who your customers are before you start writing any documentation. You may find that your customers are a diverse bunch and your documentation is catering to different needs. 

Try setting up some customer interviews to find out more about how they’re using your product. You can also talk to your support team who are the closest to your customers and will be able to provide you with a picture of who your customers are. 

When you have a clear idea of who your customers are, you can target your documentation and make it easier to use. You can pitch the tone of your writing at the right level so it resonates with users, and provides them with enough information to accomplish the task.

Use plain language

When it comes to actually writing your documentation, make sure your language is plain and simple. Customers won’t appreciate it if they can’t understand your documentation or have to Google the meanings of the words you’ve chosen. 

Writing in plain language doesn’t mean dumbing down the content, but rather writing it in a way that anyone can understand. Stay away from industry jargon and complex terms, unless you really need to use them in which case provide a definition. 

When you’re immersed in a product, it can be hard to write about it from an outsider’s point of view. There are all sorts of terms that you use every day that will be mystifying to customers. 

At the stage when you review the documentation, try to see it from your customer’s perspective. Assume they know nothing about your product – will they understand your help content or not? 

Prepare step-by-step instructions

Formatting your user documentation as step-by-step instructions means your content will be accessible to your customers. Instead of presenting users with a long wall of text, step-by-step instructions are laid out so that customers can follow one step at a time. This keeps them engaged in the task and avoids distraction. 

When you’re forced to break your documentation down into steps, it will be easier for you to see whether your content makes sense. By streamlining your documentation in this way, you’re making it easier to follow and improve the user experience for your customers. 

Step-by-step instructions make it less likely that your users will make mistakes, and increase the probability that they will make it to the end of your document. 

Add visual contents

A picture is worth a thousand words. Make your documentation more interesting for your customers by providing images, videos, and GIFs. Documentation that is broken up with images and video is a lot more inviting to users than a daunting wall of text. 

Sometimes it will just plain be easier to show how something works using a visual representation, and you owe it to your customers to convey information in the most convenient way possible. Describing something in words can be a lot more difficult than simply providing an image that represents the same thing. 

When you provide a visual representation, users can compare what they’re doing with the image or video you have used for the instructions. This makes it easier for customers to check what they’re doing is right and get through their troubleshooting experience much more quickly. 

Make content easily searchable

The advantage of having online user documentation is that you can make it searchable for your customers. Being able to search for a keyword in your documentation makes it easy for customers to instantly find what they need instead of wasting time reading through an entire manual. 

If you invest in knowledge base software like Document360 , your online knowledge base will come equipped with a powerful search bar that indexes every page of your site. Customers simply type what they’re looking for in the search bar and the system will predict results as they type. Search the entire knowledge base, not just article titles, with an AI-powered search engine that returns context-sensitive results in milliseconds.

Being able to search for content in your documentation makes the whole user experience even better as it shaves valuable time off finding the solution to their problem. The search bar should be anchored to every page in case your content isn’t quite what your customers are looking for, allowing them to search again. 

Add table of contents

As well as searching for content within your documentation, customers will also be looking for particular sections within individual articles. This is where a table of contents can come in really handy. 

A table of contents appears at the beginning of an article and lays out all of the sections contained within the document. Customers can click through to the section they feel is most relevant to them rather than having to read the whole article from beginning to end. 

Having a table of contents saves your customers time and ensures that they can navigate long articles with ease. If they read the table of contents and find what they’re looking for isn’t included, they quickly leave the page and find another article that is more relevant to their search. 

Link to relevant articles

When writing your user documentation your content is likely going to need wider context to explain certain terms, or to go into more detail about a particular aspect of your product. The best approach here is not to repeat yourself but instead link to relevant articles that your customers may find useful. 

The key thing to remember is to use interlinking sparingly. You don’t want to present your customers with a whole page full of nothing but links. It’s also a good idea for your links to open in a new tab, so you don’t take your customers away from the page they’re currently using.

With Document360 , you can take advantage of our broken link checker, which helps you validate and monitor all links within your knowledge base. Instantly fix all broken links and provide a better reader experience for your customers. 

Collect feedback

Your user documentation is never really finished. You need to collect feedback from your customers on an ongoing basis to find out the areas that could be improved, or content that is missing. 

You need to find out whether your user documentation is actually helping your customers, and the best way to do that is simply to ask them. Documentation should not just be a barrier to prevent customers from contacting human support. It should be a viable alternative to your support team and stand a good chance of solving their problems. 

Customers will appreciate you asking for their feedback – just make sure to tell them when you have implemented their changes, closing the feedback loop. With software like Document360, you can collect feedback like article ratings, and enable comments on articles too. 

Keep it fresh and updated

Remember, your user documentation has to keep pace with your products and services. Set up regular reviews to refresh your documentation and ensure it accurately reflects your offerings. 

Your user documentation will likely require new articles and updates to existing articles. Make it easy for your agents to flag when documentation needs updating and create a workflow for them to request the creation of new articles. It’s likely your support agents are some of the best people to be writing documentation so empower them to do so. 

Don’t be afraid to delete old articles or remove ones that have never been read. It’s best to only include high-performing content in your user documentation so users can more easily browse your content. 

Take a look at how Document360 elevated the user experience for Cascade:

7 best examples of user documentation

Stripe is online payment processing for internet businesses. Businesses of all sizes – from small startups to large enterprises – use Stripe to accept payments, send payouts, and manage their businesses online.

Stripe has some of the best documentation around. Stripe has a clean and uncluttered interface, immediately welcoming customers to the docs with a prominent search bar. It presents handy guides for users who want to dive straight into learning more about Stripe. 

Then, you can learn more about business operations and financial services with Stripe. The large and simple images that accompany each section invite customers to explore the knowledge base and get more out of their subscription with Stripe. 

You can explore Stripe products, which are presented as a simple list alongside a colorful icon to represent the product. 

Stripe has a huge amount of documentation to organize and they do a good job of hiding unnecessary elements on the page. When you navigate to the page level of the documentation, a left-hand navigation menu opens up which shows you all the pages in that category. 

When you get to the bottom of an article, you can rate whether the page was helpful or not and there is a link to contact the support team.

Stripe’s documentation is truly outstanding and a joy for users.

Whatfix is a Digital Adoption Platform that helps enterprises onboard, train, and support their application users. 

They have some outstanding documentation to help their users get to grips with their technology. The first page of their knowledge base is a Getting Started guide that onboards new users and tells them what Whatfix is all about. 

Whatfix has invested in a Getting Started video to explain to customers how to use the software. They are aware that many customers may be new to the concept of a Digital Adoption Platform and have taken great pains to explain what they are. 

Whatfix displays the content of their knowledge base in a visible left-hand menu, so customers can freely click around to find articles that interest them.

On an individual article page, Whatfix gives users the option to request a demo. This reflects the fact that many of their documentation users are likely to be prospective customers trying to learn more about Whatfix. 

They invite you to contact the support team if you didn’t find what you were looking for with a real email address. You can rate whether the article was helpful or not with a simple thumbs up or thumbs down. 

Ahrefs is an SEO software suite that allows its customers to build links, research keywords, conduct competitor analysis, and track their rankings. One of Ahrefs’ unique selling points is how easy it is to use, so providing user documentation is a crucial part of their product offering. 

Ahrefs starts their knowledge base with a huge search bar, inviting customers to start looking for content. Under the search bar is a list of categories, beginning with a Getting Started guide. 

If you navigate down to the category level the prominent search bar remains in view. It lists that there are 20 articles in this collection so users know how much content there is to browse through. 

At an individual article level, the search bar is still there. Ahrefs has a very simple interface and doesn’t show you any categories apart from the breadcrumbs that appear at the top of the article. They don’t want anything to distract users from reading the documentation. 

An intuitive knowledge base software to easily add your content and integrate it with any application. Give Document360 a try!

Microsoft is a multinational technology corporation that produces computer software, consumer electronics, personal computers, and related services. 

Microsoft has a huge amount of documentation to organize and they take the approach of offering a search bar right on the homepage. They make suggestions for what users can search for, including articles, training, and code samples. 

Microsoft knows they have a wide range of users to cater for so they list their documentation by product. This helps customers who know what they are searching for and is a good way to organize content. 

When you get down to the category level Microsoft provides users with solutions, scenarios, and resources. When you think about how much documentation Microsoft has it’s amazing that they can keep it all organized.

At the individual article level Microsoft keeps all articles in the category displayed on the left-hand navigation so users can orient themselves. On the right-hand side, they have a table of contents so that users can see all sections of the article and jump to the right place. 

Twilio is a customer engagement platform used by hundreds of thousands of businesses to build unique, personalized experiences for their customers. 

Twilio encourages customers to browse by category, listing the main category titles including Twilio Flex, SMS, and Voice. They have a casual “Ahoy world” message, referencing the fact that their documentation is for developers. 

Users who are browsing Twilio’s documentation are likely to have a significant amount of technical knowledge. Twilio’s content is suitably technical but laid out in a visually appealing way. 

When you get down to the category level Twilio opens out a left-hand navigation menu that shows you all the articles contained in that category. You can rate the page out of five stars using the widget in the top-right-hand corner. 

Canva is a graphic design platform that you can use to create social media graphics, presentations, posters, and other visual content based on templates. 

The Canva developer docs have a very clear interface and a small search bar in the top right-hand corner. The homepage of the docs site is a simple overview of the content contained within their knowledge base. 

When you navigate down to Canva’s quick start section, content is laid out in exactly the same way but also including images to help users better understand the instructions. Canva makes it easy for developers to create a support ticket by providing a link at the top of the page. 

When you get to the end of a page you have the option to switch forwards or backwards to other content in the user documentation. You can rate the helpfulness of the page, providing valuable feedback for the Canva team. 

Netflix is a subscription streaming service and production company. It offers a library of films and television series. 

On the homepage of Netflix’s user documentation, you are presented with a large search bar inviting users to start typing in their query. Netflix emphasizes signing in for more personalized help, suggesting its knowledge base is heavily geared towards existing customers. 

At the individual article level, the interface is simple and clear, with minimal distractions for customers who are reading the documentation. Netflix links out to other articles that might be helpful and offers a list of suggested articles that might enable users to solve their problems. 

At the bottom of the article page, Netflix asks its customers to rate whether the article was helpful or not. They also include links to how customers can get in touch with a human, either by calling the company or starting a live chat. 

User documentation is critical if you want to sell a successful product or service. Customers expect it, and your support team needs it. Good user documentation is simple to use and easy to follow, enhancing the customer experience and keeping customers coming back for more. 

Customers are likely to buy from you again if they enjoy the experience with your product and believe you invest in looking after your customers. User documentation is about seeing the bigger picture and planning for customer retention. It’s a long-term investment in your customer support strategy. 

User documentation is a love letter to your customers who have honored you with their business. It’s your chance to show how much you care about them.

Frequently Asked Questions

What are the types of documentation, what is the difference between user documentation and technical documentation.

Technical documentation encompasses a larger range of topics than user documentation. Technical documentation can be both internal and external, but user documentation is always developed with the end-user in mind. In comparison to technical documentation, the process of developing user documentation necessitates a minimum technical background.

What are the examples of user documentation?

User manuals, User guides, Software Documentation, Instruction Manual, Training Manual, Policy Manual, and SOP Manual.

Jubina Prabhakaran

Jul 7, 2020

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How to Create Online Help Documentation | MadCap Software

David Marshall | April 21, 2023

Tips & Tricks

This guest blog post was written by Dr. David Marshall, a technical writer and a training developer since 2007. He is also the owner of Neithdos Consulting Services LLC. Dr. Marshall received his DM in Executive Leadership from Colorado Technical University in 2021.  

As writers we create documentation for our customers such as:  

Case Studies 

Case studies are employed to demonstrate how a certain product benefits a business. The company will describe how this good or service helped them achieve their objectives as a business. Testimonials or customer reviews are a few of instances of case studies.   

Proposal and Pitches 

To get new business, many industries rely on proposals and pitches. To convince the stakeholder to award the project to the company, technical writers are crucial to the creation of these proposals.   

Through concise product explanations, features, and uses, brochures help users comprehend and be more drawn to a product. Key phrases are used by brochure writers to persuade readers to try the product or service. 

Press Releases 

Businesses need a way to formally announce new information about the company. Typically, the technical writer who works with the marketing division develops this. White papers, case studies, and other types of releases are all possible. 

White Papers 

Marketers use white papers to highlight a product or service's successes. These documents will be used by the author to demonstrate how the good or service was successful in resolving an issue.  

However, if our end users want something that they can easily access from anywhere at any time, to answer their questions on a product or service, this is where we can deliver! 

Why Online Help Documentation?

If you wonder how important it is to use the internet when it comes to finding answers, especially when it comes to products and services? This may be the answer. According to a recent survey approximately 90% of millennials use the web to find answers before calling customer service and close to 70% of company’s customers will use the organization’s website before calling or emailing.  As we can see online documentation is preferred because customers can get what they want instantly without searching for the hardcopy guide that is in the drawer somewhere. 

What is Online Help Documentation?

Online Help Documentation is information that companies want to share with their customers, clients, stakeholders, and partners. This helps customers understand and operate the product or perform the service by breaking down technological terms to make it easy-to-understand content. Examples of Online Help Documentation include:  

• User Help Guides  - Provide clear and sensible answers to common questions. 
• Hardcopy and Online Product Manuals  - Highlight the product's main features, general maintenance, and basic operations. A great example is the operator’s manual. 
• Assembly Guidelines  - Instructions on how to physically set up a product with detailed documentation.  
• Software Documentation - These documents show the ins and outs of a software product, such as start guides, API documentation, how-to guides and more. The key is to make it easy to understand and of interest to non-subject matter experts.  
• Knowledge Bases - A knowledge base is a source of internal documentation used by human resource departments, hiring teams, to store training material or by other parts of a company to house logos and other vector images, approved copy to help keep a company organized and its employees using best practices.

To be successful in today’s world, organizations need to create online help documentation to help answer the questions that clients have.  

What are the Benefits of Online Documentation?  

There are a few benefits to online documentation over printed user manuals such as:  

• Online Help Documentation is available anytime, anyplace, and on any device. Customers can get help using either a laptop, iPad, or mobile phone from their favorite coffee shop without worrying about what they did with the instructions that came with the product.  
• It is a great marketing tool. Keywords can be used as a search engine option (SEO) that can boost the product or service.  
• Using features such as videos, code, screenshots, diagrams, charts etc. can be very appealing to the end user. Who wants to read boring text?  
• Able to navigate with ease. The user can use search boxes, table of contents, breadcrumbs etc. as a simple method to get around the document. 
• Improved customer experience. End users will be able to get the most out of the document if it is very easy to read and follow. This builds a long-term relationship between the organization and the customer. 
• Storage. Online Help Documentation can be stored where it is easily found such as the cloud. There is no need to spend precious time finding those hard copy instructions.  

How to Create an Online Help Document 

Creating an awesome online help document is going to take time and preparation but with patience, the benefits are never ending: Here are some steps:  

• Understand the goals and the target audience. What is the objective of the document? Who is it for?  
• Write down vital questions. Anticipate any questions that may come from the readers about the product and service. This will enable the writer to gather ideas, create the document, and present the information that has significant value.  
• Create an outline. This is beneficial for writers to create the best layout and structure to address the objectives.  
• Compile the information. If you are familiar with the topic, no problem, this should be easy. However, for most of us, it will be necessary to do online research, talk to stakeholders, and look over existing documentation.  
• Avoid writing more than necessary. 
• If possible, do not use jargon. 
• Use simple language. 
• Keep the goal and readers in mind. 
• Do forget to add documentation visuals. This is what makes the customers become very interested. Use videos, images, and graphics to highlight a point or aid the end users.  
• Finalize. Time for spelling and grammar checks. Have a fresh set of eyes review the document. Present it to a subject matter expert for their input.  

What Tools Can Be Used to Create an Online Help Document?

There are several software tools a technical writer can use to develop online help documents. These tools assist in writing, editing, drawing, reviewing, and rewriting. A sample list of the tools available include: 

• MadCap Flare  - MadCap Flare is used to streamline document creation and learning & development programs. One of the favorite topic-based authoring tools for technical writers.  
• WordPress  - This software is used to create technical documentation in a blog form. Blogs written on WordPress can be integrated into the company website. 
• Google Docs  - Google Docs is becoming a tool of choice to collaborate on documents through the mobile phone.   
• Snagit  - A screen capture and screen recording software that can be used for giving feedback, training, or just show others how to do a task.  
• Visio  - Microsoft Visio is used to create design flowcharts, architectural diagrams, software product design, circuits, etc.  
• Photoshop  - A very popular image editing tool that creates and edits images for web pages, banner ads, and video graphics. 
• IXIASOFT - With MadCap Software’s recent acquisition of IXIASOFT know that you can certainly power technical documentation using a framework that is 100% DITA compliant.

Using a Template  

It may be beneficial to use a template to create an online help document so that it can be published to the server. The two templates that will be discussed are HTML and Microsoft Word 

The HTML template helps the writer create a help document that displays in the Help menu. The template helps the writer produce content that uses the same style and resources as an existing help document. To use HTML, the user must have HTML or text editor that can open and save files.  

Microsoft Word 

The Microsoft Word template assists writers that use Word 2007 or later, to include Office 365. The template provides flexibility to create new types or add existing documentation to the server. The template can be automatically creating an HTML file that is required to publish a Microsoft word document on the Help server.  

Once the documents are created, reviewed and ready to be published to the help server, take the following steps:  

• Open Windows Explorer. 
• Open the folder that contains the document file (HTML or word). 
• Open a Second Windows Explorer window. 
• Navigate to the content folder. 
• Copy the file(s) that needs to be published. 
• Close the Window Explorer windows.  
• To verify if the documents were published. Open the help viewer and search for the file.  

Storing Online Help Documentation 

Once the Online Help Documents have been created, it is time to store them in a document portal.  A document portal provides a secure centralized place where all documentation can be accessed.  

The advantages of having a document portal:  

• Reduces the amount of storage space.  
• Simplifies backup and recovery. 
• Prevents human error data loss. 
• Provides security. 
• Centralized location.  

To learn more about document portals, please read the blog How to Create a Documentation Portal located on the MadCap Software Blog site. 

Make the Online Help Documentation “POP”  

As mentioned in the Creating an Online Help Documentation section, the way to attract the readers is to make the documentation appealing. Here are some of the ways that writers can make that documentation “pop:” 

• Embedded Videos: Adding videos is one of the easiest ways to connect with the end user. In today’s modern world, it is one of the easiest ways to explain how a product works or how to use a special feature.  
• Images and Graphics: Images and graphics can provide a way to explain something without the use of words.  
• Fonts and Themes: Ensure that the fonts, themes, and colors on the online documentation blends with the website. Your customers should not feel that they are using two different websites, because the designs clash with each other.  
• Breathing Space: Make sure that there is space throughout the documents. This makes it easier to read and comprehend. A congested document will turn off readers.  
• Keep it simple: The document should be detailed; however, it needs to be straight to the point.  
• Responsive: The document should be compatible with mobile phones, tables, laptops, and desktops. This is an online document that needs to be easily accessed by anyone at any time.  

Creating a great first impression is important. Online Help Documentation can be the tool to get you there. The key to producing quality online help documentation is careful planning and thinking about the customer. As the need for hard copy documentation dwindles, online help documentation will be the go-to source. 

Parker, K. (2022, June 3). Benefits of Online Documentation . Technical Writing Is Easy. https://medium.com/technical-writing-is-easy/benefits-of-online-documentation-8d72f33eda6e  

7 Best Steps For Writing Good Software Technical Documentation . (n.d.). Www.wearedevelopers.com . Retrieved April 13, 2023, from https://www.wearedevelopers.com/magazine/7-best-steps-for-writing-good-software-technical-documentation  

Kristin Fender (n.d.). How to: Create a Help Document using a Template . Learn.microsoft.com . Retrieved April 13, 2023, from https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/dynamicsax-2012/developer/how-to-create-a-help-document-using-a-template  

How To Create An Appealing Online Documentation . (2018, November 26). Www.helpauthoringsoftware.com . https://www.helpauthoringsoftware.com/articles/how-to-create-an-appealing-online-documentation/

About the Author

David Marshall

Dr. David Marshall is a technical writer and a training developer since 2007. He is also the owner of Neithdos Consulting Services LLC. Dr. Marshall received his DM in Executive Leadership from Colorado Technical University in 2021. Currently, Dr. Marshall lives in Summerville, South Carolina and is planning on following up his dissertation on Changes Executives Need to Implement to Promote Women to Executive Positions with additional articles to business journals.

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Tips & Templates for Writing Great Knowledge Base Articles

When a customer hits a snag while using your product, the first thing they interact with won’t likely be a helpful member of your team — it’s more often a knowledge base article.

Much like your front door, you want to make your knowledge base articles as welcoming and friendly as possible. By defining and following knowledge base best practices, your team can ensure that this integral part of the customer experience is as helpful and impactful as possible.

We’ve collected a whole list of knowledge base best practices to make this process easy for you. Beyond that, you’ll find several knowledge base article examples and learn how to go about creating templates for them so it’s even easier to build effective documentation.

This is a chapter in our  Ultimate Guide to Using a Knowledge Base for Self-Service Support . When you're ready, check out the other chapters:

Chapter 1 – Knowledge Base 101: Definition, Types, and Benefits

Chapter 2 – Quick Start Guide to Creating a Knowledge Base

Chapter 3 – Knowledge Base Design Tips for Better Self-Service Support

Chapter 4 – Incredible Knowledge Base Examples That Get It Right

Chapter 5 – Tips & Templates for Writing Great Knowledge Base Articles

Chapter 6 – Creating Knowledge Base Videos: Tips, Tools, and Examples

Chapter 7 – Simple Knowledge Base SEO Tips Anyone Can Follow

Chapter 8 – The Best Knowledge Base Software + How to Choose One

Chapter 9 – Actionable Knowledge Base Metrics to Start Tracking Today

Chapter 10 – Knowledge Base Tips for a Better Customer Experience

Chapter 11 – How to Revamp Your Knowledge Base Architecture

What is a knowledge base article?

A knowledge base article is a piece of online documentation that answers a frequently asked question or provides instructions for solving a problem that customers commonly run into. Common knowledge base article types include informational articles, how-tos, troubleshooting guides, and FAQs.

Knowledge base articles are helpful for customers in all stages of their lifecycle, but they are incredibly impactful during the “help me help myself” phase of exploring your product.

But as Kathy Sierra shares in her book Making Users Awesome , companies often drop the ball with post-purchase publishing. Help content is usually one of the first things to feel the sting of mediocrity.

And while a knowledge base tool like Help Scout Docs makes it easy to create visually compelling knowledge base articles, clean, organized writing doesn’t come in the same turnkey fashion. It takes a sincere effort.

Discover the power of self‑service

Create and publish answers for customers and reduce your customer support volume by at least 20% with Help Scout Docs.

8 best practices for writing effective knowledge base articles

The best help content is informative, engaging, unquestionably straightforward, and mindful of how and why a customer searched for help in the first place. To build knowledge base articles that meet all of those criteria, follow these eight best practices.

1. Don’t make assumptions

Customers turn to your self-service documentation to solve problems, so your most important goal is to be incredibly clear. Customize the tone that you use in your documentation for the audience reading it.

For instance, write your basic help desk articles imagining that the people reading them are complete beginners. Save the advanced terminology and jargon for advanced documentation, and be wary of mentioning to-dos in passing. It’s safer to assume that customers will need guidance for each step.

For example, if a customer is looking up how to migrate their website to a new host, which one of the following leaves the least room for error?

Before you continue, make sure to change your IP address.

Before continuing, change your IP address by going to Settings > Manage Domain > IP Address.

Option one assumes that the reader knows how to change their IP address, while option two meets the needs of both customers who know how to change their IP addresses and those who don’t.

Don’t self-sabotage by making assumptions about “simple” instructions. It’s better to over-communicate. More experienced users can simply skim past instructions they don’t need, but beginners will hit hurdles when you leave critical details out of your documentation.

Similarly, use pictures and videos where you can to ensure that nothing gets lost in translation. You may know what a specific term means, but it will be easier for your customers to understand if you show them what you are talking about.

2. Use anchor links in lengthy articles

Avoiding assumptions means that you may sometimes have to write lengthier knowledge base articles to ensure you’re explaining every step of the process.

When writing a longer article, include a table of contents with anchor links to make it easy for more advanced users to skip past the information they don’t need and navigate directly to the details they’re looking for.

Even for average-length articles, users will appreciate being able to jump to the section they want. Links are also handy for list-type knowledge base articles like FAQs or best practices.

As an added bonus, well-structured documents also help search engines index specific sections of your content, making it even easier for your users to find them in a search.

3. Make the content easy to skim

Especially if you are writing significantly longer knowledge base articles, it’s essential to ensure that you don’t intimidate readers with a wall of text. When solutions aren’t easy to find, contacting support will be the customer’s next step, and no one wants to have to wait to resolve an issue.

Designer Rafal Tomal shows how proper use of subheadings and line breaks are a shortcut to an easily scannable document:

Use headers, callouts, bullet points, spacing, and visuals to highlight important information and keep the complete set of instructions visible at a glance.

Here’s an example from our Docs knowledge base article about getting started with Workflows :

It uses various types of formatting — bolding for navigational elements, an ordered list for steps in the process, and a different background color for a note — that attract attention to the critical pieces of information on the page. A reader scanning to find pertinent details will quickly find what they need.

4. Make things easy to read

A few key points to consider when you’re writing for a knowledge base are:

Write as you would speak to a friend, but edit to clarify your thoughts. Your knowledge base articles shouldn’t read like a stream of consciousness.

Consider your readers’ goals: Is the knowledge base article about learning the ins and outs of your product (curious) or fixing a bug or problem (frustration)? Adjust your tone and your content accordingly.

For articles on non-troubleshooting issues, a bit of humor is fine, but the line of annoyance is quickly crossed. Consider what frame of mind your customer will be in when they get to your knowledge base article, and write to that point.

Avoid slang and anything that may have an alternate meaning.

Get to the point quickly and simply. Some knowledge base editors offer AI features that can help cut out any extraneous content.

Stick to your brand’s tone guidelines while also writing the most practical knowledge base articles for your reader base. One of the best resources on the web for honing your voice in writing is Mailchimp’s Voice and Tone guide , which is a great resource for developing your own style guide.

5. Organize your knowledge base article logically

Good knowledge base articles become great when they’re designed around the reader’s workflow. As you create your knowledge base article process, add a step to consider where your customers will be when they read your articles.

Unless you want your customers to feel confused and disoriented and become even more frustrated, getting the flow right is vital. Here are three principles to live by:

Chronological order: It’s a must to organize a piece of help content in the chronological order of steps. The first thing your customers should see is the first step in the process they need to take to succeed.

Order by difficulty: If multiple tasks can be performed “first” (i.e., the order doesn’t matter), have customers do what’s easiest first. Early friction decreases the likelihood that they’ll finish or even follow your advice, so begin with a quick win.

Be mindful of workflow: Structure responses in a way that sustains activity and momentum. Avoid interrupting a problem-solving workflow until near the end.

Ensure you’re addressing related questions and issues by closing the article with a quick list of common follow-up questions, like in this example:

Put yourself in the customers’ shoes and consider what follow-up questions or needs they might have, and then answer them proactively.

6. Use links strategically

Including links in your knowledge base articles is a great way to direct customers to other details and instructions they may need. It also helps you stay focused on the topic at hand without covering every possible issue or piece of help a customer might need.

While linking to other helpful articles is a best practice, it’s important to use links strategically. If you link to the wrong things at the wrong time, you increase the chance of readers getting distracted or more deeply confused. You want to nudge customers to click links only when following a link is the natural next step.

Besides embedding links directly into your content, you can also include related articles at the end. As mentioned above, including related knowledge base articles on topics that your reader might be curious about next is a great way to proactively help them move forward in their journey.

7. Stick with simple article titles

Restrain your creativity in favor of clarity, and keep titles as straightforward as possible. When stuck, ask yourself: What might a customer search for?

Better yet, if your knowledge base article tool offers insights like this, you can even look at what searches your customers have made and whether the search results returned anything. If you are a Help Scout user, our Docs report is excellent for this:

Optimize your knowledge base article titles based on what people are searching for.

This list is also a great resource when trying to determine what to write. If you see that people are regularly searching for a document or category that you don’t yet have, you can use this search functionality to guide your documentation strategy moving forward.

Remember that people search with basic phrases. For instance, instead of “how to migrate your WordPress website,” they’d likely use “migrate WordPress site.” Create titles that include the operative phrases.

If you’re a Help Scout user searching for information on “forwarding emails,” our knowledge base returns the following:

None of the titles are exciting. Instead, they’re straightforward — just as they should be.

Additionally, rely on action words in the active voice for a majority of your titles:

“How to (Blank)”

“Using (Blank)”

“Setting Up (Blank)”

Or use exact phrases of the actions they’ll take, such as “uploading your first video,” “installing your plugin,” and so on.

8. Use images to save time and create clarity

“Show, don’t tell” is important to remember when creating knowledge base articles. When you’re walking customers through how to do something in your system, you can write fewer words and make your instructions clearer by including screenshots or GIFs showing each step in your interface.

For instance, if a Help Scout customer wants to learn more about assigning conversations, this is what they would see in our documentation:

Each explanatory paragraph of text is followed by a screenshot showing customers exactly what they should see when performing that step.

4 knowledge base article templates and examples

Now that you know how to write excellent knowledge base content, let’s break down the different types of knowledge base articles and look at how you can create templates for them. Templates help keep the knowledge base article process clean and easy for your team whenever they need to make new content.

1. Informational articles

Informational articles help to review a specific system, function, or feature within your product.

They are not designed to describe problem-solving steps or get into the technical nitty-gritty of a particular feature. Instead, they educate the user on something they aren’t familiar with and provide an overview of any features or options available within it.

Here’s an example of an informational article from our support knowledge base:

This article, Understanding reports in Help Scout , is an overview of the reports functionality in Help Scout. Right at the top, we explain what this informational knowledge base article is about and provide quick links to jump to whatever topics are relevant to the reader.

Informational article template

Title:  About [Feature Name]

Description:  Brief overview description of the product or feature the informational article is about.

Links:  Anchor links to any of the individual topics within the more extensive informational article.

Further reading:  Links to related articles or other content around this specific feature.

2. How-to articles

How-to articles are similar to informational articles in that they describe how to use a specific feature without additional troubleshooting steps. They are typically structured as a list and should be limited to a single feature or task, like changing a password or adding a new user.

Here’s an example of a how-to article from our support knowledge base:

This article, called Forward Conversations Outside of Help Scout , is a how-to that includes a list of steps to take to share a Help Scout message with someone who doesn't have an account.

The article also includes information on how to keep to keep track of conversations that have been forwarded.

How-to article template

Title : How to [task name]

Task:  A description of the task that your readers are looking to accomplish.

Prerequisites (if applicable):  If you have different pricing tiers, this should include information about which products or pricing plans this how-to applies to.

Table of contents (if necessary):  Create anchor links for quick navigating.

Instructions:

Outcome:  What users can expect to happen after completing the steps in the how-to knowledge base article.

Further reading:  Links to related knowledge base articles or how-tos.

3. Troubleshooting articles

Troubleshooting articles address a specific problem that a customer is having and offer steps to resolve it. Just like how-to articles, troubleshooting articles need to focus on one particular issue. While you can have multiple different options for troubleshooting, they should all be focused on a single problem.

For instance, you may have four different processes by which someone could resolve an issue with their browser. All four processes have a place in the troubleshooting article, but they all need to fix the same problem.

Here’s an example of a troubleshooting article from our documentation:

This article, titled Troubleshoot Email Delivery Issues with Google Groups and Help Scout , starts by detailing the different reasons why someone may run into delivery issues. It then breaks down the two causes in more detail.

We lead with the least complicated troubleshooting step and then follow up with the second option and a bulleted list of actions to try to fix it:

Troubleshooting article template

Title:  Troubleshooting [name of the issue]

Problem:  Brief description of the problem to be solved and the typical reasons why it occurs.

Anchor links to the specific resolutions (if there’s more than one).

Solution 1 (with a bulleted list, if applicable)

Solution 2 (with a bulleted list, if applicable)

Solution 3 (with a bulleted list, if applicable)

Outcome:  Brief description of how to understand if the issue is resolved or if it is still occurring after trying a troubleshooting step.

Further reading:  Links to related articles.

An FAQ page is a knowledge base article that lists common questions around a specific area of your product. For instance, some companies have an FAQ on things like shipping and order issues, payment processing, and account management.

You may consider having a single FAQ or several more minor FAQs for specific product areas.

Here’s a great example of an FAQ page from our Docs site:

The article, Learn about Help Scout Docs , has a series of subheaders, each one dedicated to specific questions readers might have about the product.

FAQ article template

Title:  Frequently Asked Questions about [Product or Feature]

Topic (if applicable):  Brief description of the product or feature that the article pertains to, perhaps including images or an overview video.

Table of contents:  Anchor links to each question that is answered within the FAQ.

Further reading:  Links to related articles, such as how-tos or troubleshooting related to the product

Go forth and create beautiful, impactful knowledge base articles

Knowledge base articles are the first thing that most of your customers will see when it comes to your product. They have a variety of uses:

They can help educate users on your product.

They can answer commonly asked questions.

They can assist when troubleshooting specific issues.

Because of how integral they are to your customer’s experience, it’s very important to pay attention to how you write and structure them.

Create a knowledge base article process that supports your team in writing impactful, informative articles from the start, and then use precise language and a defined structure to ensure that your customers always know where to find answers when they need them.

Like what you see? Share with a friend.

Mercer smith.

Mercer is the VP of CX Insights & Community at PartnerHero, a yoga fanatic, and strives to make the world a little bit happier one customer at a time. You can find her at mercenator.com and on Twitter .

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5 real-life examples of beautiful technical documentation

Product Marketing Manager, Marketplace

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This is a guest post by Nils Bier, Customer Success team lead at K15t Software. He has been working to help technical communication teams by using Atlassian tools and Scroll add-ons for 5 years.

Technical documentation is an invaluable resource for your users. And with fast-moving development teams and product release cycles, it can be a challenge to keep your documentation up-to-date, accessible, and looking professional.

Collaborative editing in Confluence is a great way to meet the challenge of making your documentation process truly agile. But what’s the best way to then deliver these docs to your users?

Providing users with an online version of your technical documentation is fast becoming a requirement for good customer service. But publishing docs online means that companies need to address a couple of key aspects if they want their online docs to be an asset for the brand.

What makes for great online documentation

Which productivity hack will work best for you?

More and more companies are choosing to host their technical documentation on their corporate websites or help pages (hint: It’s also a very powerful SEO tactic). Keep the following in mind if you want to be one of them:

• Efficiency: Exporting technical documentation written in Confluence and hosting it on your website or help page should be an efficient process (especially for agile dev teams). The rule should be to avoid duplicating documentation (no copy-pasting!) whenever possible.
• Staying up-to-date: Your online documentation needs to stay up-to-date. There is no point in providing your users with inaccurate documentation. As a best practice, the documentation on your website should be automatically sourced from your documentation in Confluence.
• Corporate design: Every touchpoint users have with your company – including your website – has to adhere to certain design guidelines. Apply the same rule to your online documentation, making it recognizable and allowing it to elevate your company’s brand.
• Responsiveness: We live in a digital and mobile world. Your online documentation, just like the rest of your website, needs to be responsive if you want to provide your customers with a proper information experience across multiple devices.

5 real-life examples of online technical documentation

As time goes on it’s heartening to see more and more examples of organizations that deliver truly great technical documentation experiences to their users. Here are a couple of companies that publish their Confluence-written tech docs online.

1. BMC: Providing answers fast

We all need to find answers to our questions, quickly. BMC responds to this need by enhancing their documentation with expand macros and clear content overviews.

2. CA Technologies: Creating community through comments

CA Technologies not only provides their extensive documentation in multiple languages and versions, but also gives their users the option of commenting. This social function allows users to pose questions or suggestions and give valuable input. That way documentation actually becomes a real customer service touchpoint and gives their tech writers the chance to continuously improve their documentation.

3. iMedidata: Navigation for the win

Navigation is an essential part of a user’s experience. It is clear that the Medidata technical communication team understand this very well, as they not only provide a page tree and further content suggestions, but also use anchor shortcuts in their documentation. It definitely helps users find the doc content they are looking for more quickly.

4. NimbleUser: Beautiful and branded

It’s obvious that NimbleUser’s documentation isn’t just styled according to their design guidelines but also features a very clean and organized structure. These attributes also apply when viewing their documentation on a mobile device (three cheers for responsive design).

5. K15t Software: Rich content experience with video

K15t Software, an Atlassian add-on vendor and my employer, also uses Confluence to write technical documentation . Our process encourages technical writers to add not just image but video content in Confluence, providing users with a rich choice in how they want to consume the published information.

Behind their screens

All of these companies have chosen to use Confluence as their home for online technical documentation that also lives online. With that ability to both edit and publish right from Confluence, there’s no need to duplicate content in a different CMS. In order to publish their technical docs directly from Confluence to their web space, they utilize an add-on called Scroll Viewport . It adds a customized web theme layer on top of your documentation that doesn’t interfere with writing tech docs in any way.

This makes for an efficient publishing process that allows you to style your documentation space so that it exactly matches your design guidelines, offers a responsive viewing experience and seamlessly integrates into your website – without changing or adding complication to your internal Confluence UI.

This is a guest post by K15t Software, maker of content management add-ons for Confluence and Jira, available in the Atlassian Marketplace.

Advice, stories, and expertise about work life today.

Best practice in writing help documents and manuals

Writing help documentation can be a tricky process. You need to learn to think like a product user not a developer . As the person responsible for writing the help documentation you may well have been involved with your product for a while, and have become very familiar with how it works. This is useful when writing help documentation but it can also be a disadvantage as you approach the product in a different way to those looking at it for the first time. What may be obvious to you may be a complete mystery to someone without your prior experience of the product, or knowledge of the design process.

What are the best practice in writing help documents?

Very few people open a help document at the beginning and read through it to the end. Most people open help documentation when they want to know one particular thing. Often there is a function, or a tool that they want to use, and they can’t understand it without one specific piece of information. They want to be able to open the help manual and quickly locate information they need and then get back to work as soon as possible.

There are some specific things we can say about the way help documentation needs to be arranged:

• Help documentation must be arranged logically
• Help documentation must designed so that it is easy to scan
• Help documentation must come with a topical index

Arrange the help document logically

The best practice in writing help documents is to arrange all material by topic . Users will generally understand most things they need to know to make your product work, but there will be a few areas where they will need some help. As a technical author it is your job to write the documentation in such a way that they can easily locate those topics they need help understanding.

Design the help documentation to be read quickly

The best help documentation is always easy to scan . Users need to be able to pick out the section on the page which contains the information they need. They don’t want to read an entire chapter of closely typed text telling them information they already know. Break down the text into short, easy to read paragraphs and make it clear what each section is about.

Remember to include a good index

The index is probably the most important part of any help documentation . Unlike a conventional book many readers will turn to the index before they read any other part of the book. The index should be as complete as possible, and should list every topic that your readers may search for. It is also an excellent idea to include synonyms of topics.

How can you conform to these best practices in writing help documents?

Writing help documents in this way might sound like hard work but there are authoring tools available to help make the process simple. HelpNDoc is an example of free software which does all the hard work for you. This package includes keyword editors, and topic editors to make arranging your work simple , and when you have completed all the writing your document is automatically converted into multiple formats with no extra work.

See also...

When help and manuals go wrong.

Almost everyone has at least one help related horror story to tell. Whether it is about trying to understand a product when the help manual has been written in such poor English that it is …

Why writing a quality help manual may be the best investment your business makes

Launching a new product takes both time and money, in any business both of these are generally in short supply. There are always pressures to reduce costs and get the product complete and ready for …

Write better help documents in half the time

Writing help documentation can be a very long process. If you have a complicated product to explain it’s not unusual for them to be several hundred help pages, and even a fairly simple product may …

The idiots guide to writing help documents and manuals

If you have never written help documentation before then it can seem a little scary. The end-users of your product are relying on you to help them understand every function of the product, and their …

17 Best Software Documentation Tools for 2024 (Free & Paid)

Shubham Deshmukh

Read more posts by this author.

Good software documentation is easy to read , well-organized , accessible , & comprehensive .

But you might ask, isn't creating such technical documentation a time-consuming (and usually repetitive) task?

Luckily, we're in 2024, and those tasked with creating documentation—be it developers, trainers, or anyone wanting to explain software functionality—must now use and master a set of documentation tools. With AI in action, these documentation tools can instantly create instruction manuals, standard operating procedures(SOPs), or even in-app tutorials.

There is, however, one question that (probably) got you to this blog post: how do you determine which software documentation tool is most appropriate for the task in hand and has the shortest learning curve?

And that's precisely what we are answering in this blog. As you navigate through, you’ll find 17 best software documentation tools — each one categorized by usage scenarios, weighed for pros and cons, and presented with real customer feedback.

Before that, we’ll cover some basics to set the stage:

What is Software Documentation?

What is a software documentation tool.

• Benefits of Software Documentation

Different Types of Software Documentation Tools

• How to choose the right Software Documentation tool?

Let’s begin!!

Software documentation is like a guidebook for software, within which there are details of how the software works, what it does, and how to use it.  They can serve different purposes, such as explaining how to use a feature, understanding the structure of a system, or guiding development and testing activities.

Here are some basic examples of software documentation to understand it better:

• When developers integrate a payment gateway into an e-commerce website, they refer to the API documentation provided by the payment service provider to understand how to send and receive payment requests.
• A new employee at a company uses the user manual for the company's project management software to learn how to create tasks, assign deadlines, and collaborate with team members.
• A software engineer adds comments within the codebase to explain the purpose and functionality of specific functions or modules, making it easier for other developers to understand and modify the code in the future.
• An application user can access comprehensive help articles within the software to gain a deeper understanding of its functionality, which maximizes the application's benefits.

A software documentation tool is a piece of technology or a digital platform designed to assist developers, technical writers, product managers, L&D trainers and other stakeholders in creating, managing, and publishing documentation for software projects.

Using these tools, you can help your users access accurate, up-to-date, and easily accessible software documentation, saving time and reducing errors.

Benefits of Software Documentation Tools

Software documentation tools are crucial for a variety of reasons, benefiting both developers and users:

For Creators:

• Increased Efficiency: Features like templates, version control, and collaboration streamline the creation and management of documentation, saving developers time and effort compared to manual processes.
• Improved Quality: These tools promote consistent formatting, style, and structure, providing more professional and user-friendly documentation . Some tools offer built-in checks for broken links, outdated information, and accessibility issues.
• Enhanced Collaboration: They facilitate collaboration between stakeholders by allowing real-time co-editing, commenting, and feedback mechanisms. This ensures everyone is on the same page and information is readily available.
• Knowledge Sharing : They create a centralized repository for documentation, making it easily accessible to all developers working on the project. This reduces duplication of effort and ensures everyone has the latest information.
• Better Comprehension: Clear and well-organized documentation helps users understand how to use the software effectively, reducing frustration and support tickets.
• Faster Onboarding: Good documentation reduces the time it takes for new users to get up to speed with the software, leading to increased productivity and adoption.
• Self-Service Support: When users have access to comprehensive documentation, they can often solve their own problems without needing to contact support, saving time and resources for both parties.

Choosing the right software documentation tool depends on your specific needs and budget. The following list has many great options, underlined with its own strengths and weaknesses.

Listed below are the 17 best software documentation tools divided into five categories, each with a unique focus:

1. User Onboarding and Guidance Tools:

• Focus: Empowering users with seamless navigation and understanding through intuitive guides and interactive experiences.
• Tools: Gyde DAP, ProProfs Knowledge Base, Tettra, Tallyfy, Gyde Screenshot Guidance
• Applications: Craft interactive product tours, step-by-step guides, incorporate in-app screenshots with annotations, and deliver contextual onboarding experiences for smoother software adoption.

2. Collaborative Knowledge Bases:

• Focus: Real-time collaboration and visual organization of knowledge for enhanced team productivity.
• Tools: Nuclino, Notion, Confluence, Dropbox Paper.
• Applications: Establish internal wikis for streamlined team knowledge sharing, project documentation, and creation of collaborative notes, promoting efficient information exchange within the team.

3. Internal Wikis and Documentation Platforms:

• Focus: Centralizing and managing comprehensive documentation, often for multiple audiences.
• Tools: Document360, ClickHelp, Read the Docs, GitHub (Wikis).
• Applications: Develop user manuals, technical documentation, API references, and product knowledge bases while facilitating internal guide creation, ensuring comprehensive and accessible information repositories.

4. API Documentation Tools:

• Focus: Designing, documenting, and testing APIs in detail.
• Tools: Apiary, Doxygen.
• Applications: Enable developers to explore and use APIs effectively by creating comprehensive API reference guides, facilitating seamless API integration into various applications.

5. Markdown Editors and Writing Tools:

• Focus: Simplifying the writing and formatting of documentation in Markdown format.
• Tools: MarkdownPad, Typora.
• Applications: Craft user manuals, technical documentation, blog posts, and knowledge base articles while supporting collaborative document editing, promoting clarity and consistency in documentation creation.

A. User Onboarding and Guidance Tools

1. gyde dap.

• Software Type - No-code Digital Adoption Platform(Both for Employee and Customer Facing Software)
• Capterra Ratings - 5/5
• Free trial - On request
• Pricing - Request a personalized quote

Gyde appears as a self-help widget right inside the application that you want your users to get acquainted with and eventually become proficient in. Through this just-in-time learning approach, Gyde provides step-by-step instructions to your users. It improves their performance and swiftly enhances their application understanding in real time.

Key Features

• Audio-visual walkthroughs - Employees find audio-visual cues within the flow of work, guiding them from one step to another. Plus, trainers can easily create these walkthroughs with a drag-and-drop interface. Meaning, no need to write codes to guide, inform, and assist your employees through a complex application.

• Contextual Help articles - Gyde doubles as a knowledge base platform . It lets employees conveniently access detailed help articles right when they need them. Providing such instant guidance through FAQs & how-tos for application processes makes them self-serve and reduces the burden on the support teams.
• Power Analytics - With all these intuitive features, measuring its impact is vital. The backend has multiple key metrics (like when the user abandoned a walkthrough or how often a certain help article was viewed).  Based on this data, you can improve your documentation content.

Productivity booster feature — When formulating walkthroughs and help articles, there's no need to actually write the help content; it will be generated automatically based on the processes using the capabilities of Gen AI.

• Easily convert all documentation content into multiple languages
• Smoothly integrates with any cloud-based, web-based, or mobile applications
• Follows microlearning principle, that helps with employee’s knowledge retention

• Not compatible with desktop-based software

Customer Reviews

This is a customer review that was posted on Capterra by Megha, a product consultant in e-learning industry:

“Gyde offers highly flexible, configurable, and easy-to-access infrastructure, you can create workflows and help videos with. You can seamlessly activate and deactivate these workflows on any software instance. The walkthroughs can be auto-triggered or manually activated. Would you also like to know what's the cherry on top? It's the ability to dynamically display only relevant steps from walkthrough, per your platform configuration settings.”

The Verdict

Gyde DAP is incredibly beneficial for corporate trainers as it allows them to break down complex documentation topics into easily digestible modules. These modules can then be transformed into interactive walkthroughs, providing hands-on, on-the-job training for employees.

2. ProProfs Knowledge Base

• Software Type - Knowledge Base Platform
• Capterra Ratings - 4.7/5
• Free trial - Available for 15 days
• Pricing - Starts from $49 Per Author/Month

ProProfs breaks down information barriers by facilitating the creation of internal and external knowledge bases for employees and customers. Its intuitive MS Word-like editor simplifies technical documentation creation, while the platform allows scheduling articles for automatic expiration when needed.

• Internal Comment Collaboration - This knowledge base allows users to participate in live discussions, exchange ideas, and collectively improve the content in real-time.
• Streamlined User Management - Effortlessly manage user roles by adding, removing, or assigning permissions, granting control over access and actions within the knowledge base.
• Simplified Knowledge Base Creation - Select from over 25 pre-designed page templates to swiftly construct knowledge base pages. Share your knowledge base effortlessly with an unlimited audience.
• Track the revision history of changes, set IP restrictions, and assign user roles
• Presents reports in graphical and tabular forms
• Requires minimum coding knowledge
• In-app technical errors causing slow running system
• Can be pricey for SMEs

Below is a customer review we found on g2 by Vaishnavi K., a Search Engine Optimization Executive:

“We love its AI-powered reporting system. It is so comprehensive and provides such rich insights into how effective and helpful customers find our knowledge base. And all the information is presented in beautiful charts and tables which further makes it easy for us to decode and analyze the data.”

ProProfs offers a suite of products, including ProProfs Help Desk, ProProfs Chat, and ProProfs SurveyMaker, forming a robust tech stack for comprehensive customer support management. This integrated solution particularly benefits SaaS companies seeking in-app technical documentation services.

• Software Type : AI-powered knowledge base
• g2 Ratings : 4.6/5
• Free trial : Available for 30 days
• Pricing: $7,200 per year - up to 50 users

Tettra is an AI-powered knowledge management system that helps businesses centralize and organize important information, making it easily accessible to all team members. It functions as an internal knowledge base and company wiki, offering a simple interface and seamless integration with popular collaboration tools like Slack, Microsoft Teams, and Google Drive.

• Centralized knowledge repository: Tettra provides a central location for storing and organizing your company's important information.
• Collaboration tools: It allows team members to collaborate on creating and editing documents, which helps to ensure that everyone is on the same page.
• AI-powered search: Tettra's AI-powered search engine makes finding the information you need easy, even if you don't know exactly what you're looking for.
• Tettra's verification feature helps maintain the accuracy and reliability of information within the knowledge base.
• It integrates seamlessly with popular workplace tools like Slack and Google Workspace.
• Primarily designed for internal knowledge management, it might not be ideal for customer-facing content or complex knowledge bases.
• Only one person can edit a draft at a time, which might hinder larger collaborative writing projects.

Here’s a review we found on g2 by Sean C., Chief Operating Officer:

“The fast and easy nature of adding content, finding content, and editing content in Tettra is wonderful. My org had come from a SharePoint-based system of folders and docs which was ok for a bit but ultimately caused us to struggle with finding and keeping information up to date. Tettra makes it easy for every individual in my org to find, edit, or capture what they need. It has been amazing for capturing and improving cross-team processes.”

For small teams with primarily internal documentation, Tettra is a strong contender with its ease of use, collaboration features, and AI-powered search. For public-facing documentation, explore other tools specifically designed for customer-facing knowledge bases with richer formatting and user experience features.

Ultimately, the best way to choose is to try it out. Tettra offers a free plan, so take advantage of it to see if it fits your workflow and meets your software documentation needs.

• Software Type - Workflow and process management
• Capterra Ratings - 4.4/5
• Free trial - Yes
• Pricing - $25 per member

Tallyfy is a workflow and process management software that helps businesses automate tasks, document processes, track workflows, and run training in a single system.

• Visual process builder: Drag-and-drop interface to easily design workflows with tasks, forms, approvals, and branching logic.
• Real-time progress tracking: See the status of every task, who's working on it, and due dates at a glance.
• Internal and external collaboration: Share workflows with team members and clients (via guest access).
• Users generally praise Tallyfy's customer support team for being responsive and helpful.
• You can access a library of pre-built templates for common processes, saving you time and effort.
• Tallyfy allows you to automate some tasks within your processes, such as sending notifications or collecting data.
• Users report that the user dashboard and the templates themselves have limited customization options.
• While the user-friendly interface is a plus for some, others might find it lacks the depth and control offered by more complex workflow management tools.

Here’s a review we found on g2 by Justin A., Client Analyst:

“The TallyFy staff are incredibly responsive when unanticipated needs arise. They closely listen to our suggestions and improve the product based on those comments. The interface for us and out clients is simple, clean, and clear with high levels of integration and customization.”

Tallyfy can be a useful tool for basic software documentation, especially for user guides, walkthroughs, and process explanations. Its strength lies in visual mapping and collaboration, making it valuable for depicting user interactions. However, for in-depth technical documentation, API references, or projects requiring advanced formatting and specialized features, dedicated documentation tools might be more suitable.

5. Gyde Screenshot Guidance

• Software Type - Screenshot & video Capture
• Chrome Ratings - 5/5
• Free trial - Free version available
• Pricing - Starts at $9/Month

Save countless hours of application documentation every month by using Gyde, a Chrome productivity extension. With Gyde integrated into your browser, you can transform any application task into a detailed, step-by-step guide in mere seconds – all in both video and screenshot formats.

Suppose you need to demonstrate a basic process, like how to empty the trash in your Gmail inbox. With Gyde, you can effortlessly capture the steps and share them via a link.

• Focused Step Highlighting: Emphasize specific steps by graying out the surrounding area, directing users' attention to the highlighted step for enhanced clarity.
• AI Text-Enhancer for Step Titles: Instantly refine step titles with a single click using the AI Text-Enhancer feature, ensuring clarity and professionalism in your guides.
• Confidential Detail Protection: Blur sensitive information in screenshots while capturing them, ensuring data privacy and security.
• Auto-Generated Voice in Video Guides : Enjoy the convenience of auto-generated voiceovers in your video guides, saving time and effort in narration.
• Download guides in PDF or MP4 format for offline access, enabling users to refer to them anytime, anywhere, without internet connectivity.
• Easily embed guides within knowledge bases or other platforms, facilitating efficient sharing and access for users across various channels.
• Gyde is restricted to browser use and doesn't extend to desktop applications.

Here’s a review by Raunak Gupta we found on the Chrome web store:

“I really value how-to docs. When a colleague introduced me to Gyde, I was truly amazed by all its features and I've been completely engrossed in it for about a month now. I've created numerous screenshot guides for our knowledge base and it's made sharing them even more convenient :)”

Gyde significantly improves the way software documentation is created and shared, ultimately leading to better user experiences. It offers a range of features that simplify the process of creating guides for software usage. It’s perfect for creating training manuals, technical documentation, onboarding docs, product updates, SOPs, and more.

B. Collaborative Knowledge Bases

• Software Type - Collaborative game design documentation tool
• Capterra Ratings - 4.8/5
• Free trial - Yes, offers a free plan
• Pricing - $10 per member per month

Nuclino replaces scattered docs, wikis, and project tools with a unified workspace. Organize knowledge, manage projects, and collaborate on anything easily. It has features such as a flexible and intuitive editor, real-time collaboration, powerful search, Kanban boards, and mind maps. Teams love its simplicity, speed, and ability to break down silos.

• Unified Workspace: Store everything – notes, documents, projects, plans, ideas – all in one place. This makes it easy to find information, stay organized, and keep everyone on the same page.
• Multiple Views: Choose from a List view for a clean overview, a Board view for managing projects visually, a Table view for organizing data, and a Graph view for exploring connections between ideas.
• Seamless Collaboration: Real-time editing and instant updates ensure everyone in your team is always working with the latest information. Collaborate on documents, brainstorm ideas, and discuss tasks directly within Nuclino.
• Granular access control and data encryption ensure your information remains secure.
• Quickly locate any information within your workspace, even across large projects.
• Free plan for individual users and competitive paid plans for teams.
• Some users report performance issues in very large workspaces, particularly with the Graph view.
• Paid plans can become expensive for teams with many members.
• While functional, the mobile apps may not offer the full feature set and user experience of the desktop version.

Here’s a review we found on Capterra by Eugene, Founder and CEO in New Zealand:

“One positive aspect of Nuclino that I appreciated was how easy it was to use. The interface is intuitive and simple, making it easy to navigate and find what I need. Additionally, the drag-and-drop features for adding images to documents were helpful and convenient.”

For small to medium teams looking to boost collaboration and adaptability, Nuclino is a must-try. Its user-friendly interface, variety of viewing options, and robust collaboration capabilities can greatly streamline your documentation efforts. It's worth giving Nuclino a try, especially since it offers a free trial, and comparing it with other options before settling on a final decision.

• Software Type - Productivity and note taking(
• Pricing - $15 Per User/Month

Notion is like all your notes, docs, tasks, and projects, rolled into one flexible workspace. Just type "/" and explore all that Notion can do. You can drag-drop text, images, to-do lists, even databases, building powerful organizations from scratch. The free plan gets you started, with paid options unlocking more bells and whistles.

• Document Organization: Create content blocks with a mix of text, images, videos, code, and more on a single page. Create relational databases for tasks, contacts, projects, etc.
• Pre-made templates: Views: Use pre-made templates for projects, meeting notes, wikis, and more to get to speed quickly.
• Quick Collaboration: Collaborate on pages with others in real time. Track changes and revert to previous versions. Set different permission levels for collaborators.
• Basic features available for free, making it accessible.
• Highly customizable to fit individual and team needs.
• Intuitive interface and easy to learn for most users.
• Learning curve for formulas may be a challenge for users seeking automation in Notion.
• Limited text editing features compared to platforms like Google Docs may necessitate occasional use of external tools for more advanced document formatting.

Here’s a review we found on Capterra by a verified linkedin user:

“There are so many reasons I love this platform, but truly, the ease of use is #1. It is so easy to set up different pages and databases, and I have no trouble switching between my laptop and my phone. I also love that there are so many FREE templates available that have been created by actual users.”

Notion is a powerful and versatile tool for organizing information, managing projects, and collaborating with others. However, it's important to consider its learning curve, mobile app limitations, and potential costs before diving in.

• Software Type - Collaborative knowledge management
• g2 Ratings - 4/5
• Pricing - $20 Per User/Month

Bit.ai is a cloud-based platform for creating, collaborating, and organizing all your knowledge in one place . Think of it as a hub for documents, wikis, project plans, and more, accessible from anywhere. Teams and individuals use it to build dynamic docs, share files, and integrate their favorite tools.

• Smart docs: Create interactive documents with embedded multimedia (videos, charts, maps) and live data integrations.
• AI-powered features: Use AI suggestions for content editing, grammar checks, and similar documents.
• Customizable templates: Choose from pre-designed templates for proposals, meeting notes, reports, and more.
• Basic features available for free, suitable for individual or small team use.
• Create various document types, wikis, and knowledge bases in one platform.
• Might not be the best choice for text-heavy, long-form documents.
• May not have all the advanced formatting features found in traditional document editors.

Here’s a review we found on g2 by Khawaja A. Senior Software Engineer:

“The best thing I like is how it gives you a subdomain for your company name, It has an innovative dashboard where we can manage workspaces for our team as well as our office. We can manage our documents separately for them.”

Bit.ai is a good option for creating visually engaging and interactive documents, wikis, and knowledge bases with easy collaboration. However, its limited formatting options, lack of a mobile app, and cost for larger teams might be drawbacks for some users.

9. Confluence

• Software Type - Workspace collaboration tool
• g2 Ratings - 4.1/5
• Pricing - $11.55 Per User/Month

Confluence is a popular team workspace tool by Atlassian. Think Google Docs for teams, but with more structure and organization. Teams use it to create, share, and collaborate on documents, projects, and knowledge bases. Imagine a central hub for everything your team works on.

• Wiki-style collaboration: Create, edit, and share content collaboratively in a wiki-like environment.
• Version control: Track changes and revert to previous versions of documents.
• Powerful formatting: Enhance content with tables, images, videos, and macros.
• Space organization: Organize information into spaces and pages for different teams and projects.
• User-friendly interface makes it easy for anyone to contribute.
• Enables efficient teamwork on documents and projects.
• Adapt to different team needs with flexible spaces and layouts.
• Advanced features require more technical knowledge.
• Extensive customization options can lead to information overload. Performance can slow down with large amounts of data or users.
• Integrating with non-Atlassian tools can be complex.

On software listing sites such as g2, Confluence gets strong ratings. Here’s a review we found by Shree Nandan D., a Subject Matter Expert:

“The templates provide a jumpstart to any kind of documentation, be it the how-to docs, project outline, technical specs, or internal specs, the application has a plethora of templates that provide the necessary boilerplate to get started with any documentation. Our team uses it daily and because it is a cloud-based application, real-time collaboration is a breeze, which facilitates frequent usage.”

Confluence offers a powerful and user-friendly platform for collaborating and managing team knowledge. However, its cost, potential complexity, and mobile limitations might be drawbacks for some users. Consider your team's size, collaboration needs, and budget before making a decision.

10. Dropbox Paper

• Software Type - Editing tool
• Capterra Ratings - 4.5/5
• Free trial - No
• Pricing - $24 Per User/Month

Dropbox Paper is a collaborative document editing tool provided by Dropbox. It allows users to create, share, and edit documents in real-time, facilitating seamless collaboration among teams. You can brainstorm, write, embed images & videos, assign tasks, and chat in one seamless experience.

• Rich Media Support: Embed images, videos, code snippets, and even Google Maps directly into documents, creating engaging and interactive content.
• Task Management: Assign tasks within documents, track progress, and set deadlines, ensuring everyone is on the same page.
• Templates: Create custom templates for recurring documents like meeting agendas or project proposals, saving time and effort.
• Timeline View: Visualize the history of edits and comments on a document, understanding how content evolved over time.
• Backed by Dropbox's security infrastructure.
• Great for individuals and teams of all technical abilities
• Storage and collaboration features are restricted in the free version.
• Upload limits might hinder sharing bulky documents.

Here’s a review we found on g2 where Gordon D. says Dropbox to be ‘The freelancer’s/remote worker’s best friend’:

Dropbox offers some really great features - I can send a link to a file on the service to anyone who isn't on the service; I can share folders and data with select people; and I get plenty of space. (There's the requisite get-free-space-to-have-your-friends-sign-on, but even at a rock bottom $10 month for 100 GB, there's still plenty of value to Dropbox).

Dropbox Paper is a powerful collaboration tool for teams who need a simple and flexible platform for document creation and editing. Its intuitive interface, real-time collaboration features, and seamless integration with other Dropbox services make it an ideal choice for teams looking to streamline documentation processes and enhance productivity.

C. Internal Wikis and Documentation Platforms

11. document360.

• Software Type - Knowledge base software
• g2 Ratings - 4.7/5
• Pricing - $599 Per Project/Year

Document360 is a cloud-based software platform designed to simplify creating and managing knowledge bases and software documentation. It’s a one-stop shop for all your documentation needs, from internal project guides to external customer-facing articles. Its user-friendly interface and powerful features help you write, organize, and publish docs effortlessly.

• Intuitive WYSIWYG editor: Easy to create and format content without coding knowledge.
• Markdown support: Advanced users can leverage Markdown for more flexibility.
• Drag-and-drop organization: Easily structure your knowledge base with categories and articles.
• Create and deliver content in various languages.
• Connects with popular tools like HelpScout, Zendesk, and Microsoft Teams.
• Lacks single sourcing and content reuse as the content cannot be easily reused across different knowledge bases.
• Some users find the AI features underdeveloped.

Here’s a review we found on g2 by Nibu T., Director in Information Development:

“The attention to detail is what impressed me the most. Most features are well-designed and thoughtful. What I like the most is their transparency when it comes to the roadmap, and how attentive they are to what's burning for customers. I like that the product is intuitive. When you first log in, you simply know where to go for what.”

Document360 is a strong contender in the knowledge base software market. It offers a user-friendly interface, rich features, and affordable pricing. However, it has limitations in terms of integrations, content reuse, and customization.

12. ClickHelp

• Software Type - AI-powered online documentation tool
• g2 Ratings - 4.8/5
• Pricing - $580/Month

ClickHelp is an online documentation tool designed to help you create and publish user manuals, guides, and knowledge bases easily. It empowers technical writers with features like topic-based authoring, WYSIWYG editing, and integrations with popular helpdesk platforms. ClickHelp helps streamline your documentation workflow and deliver high-quality, accessible information to your users.

• Customizable Workspaces: Organize projects by client, department, or any other category using Workspaces. Within each Workspace, create Spaces, Folders, Lists, and Tasks for a hierarchical structure.
• Collaboration Tools: Chat directly within tasks, leave comments, assign @mentions, and use the built-in document editor for real-time collaboration.
• In-app Video Recording: Capture explanations, feedback, and updates directly within tasks for enhanced communication.
• Adapts to diverse needs and workflows across industries and team sizes.
• ClickUp is constantly evolving, adding new features and improving existing ones based on user feedback.
• Generous free plan, affordable paid plans, and enterprise options for large teams.
• The sheer number of features can be overwhelming for new users.
• Customization freedom can lead to cluttered workspaces if not managed effectively.

Here’s a review we found on g2 by Lucas M.:

“ClickUp is a comprehensive system through which I can manage my Development and QA (Technology) team on a daily basis, not only in relation to day-to-day activities but also in administrative management. With it, I can create documentation for internal and external clients, track and monitor activities, and analyze indicators through dashboards and reports. ”

ClickUp is a versatile and powerful project management platform with a generous free plan and attractive paid options. While it has a learning curve, its customization potential, rich feature set, and collaborative features make it a strong choice for teams of all sizes looking for a comprehensive solution.

13. Read the Docs

• Software Type - Open-sourced software documentation hosting platform
• g2 Ratings - 5/5
• Free trial - 30-day
• Pricing - $250/Month

Read the Docs is a popular documentation hosting platform primarily used by software developers. It allows developers to easily create, host, and maintain documentation for their projects. The platform automatically generates documentation from source code repositories, making it convenient for developers to keep documentation up to date with their codebase.

• Documentation hosting: It provides a dedicated platform to host your project's documentation, making it easily accessible to users around the world.
• Version control: Read the Docs integrates seamlessly with various version control systems like Git, Mercurial, and Subversion, ensuring your documentation stays up-to-date with your codebase.
• Multiple doc generation tools: It supports various documentation creation tools, including Sphinx (with reStructuredText markup), MkDocs, and Jupyter Book, catering to different project needs and preferences.
• Perfect for budget-conscious open-source projects.
• With API access, it enables automation and integrations.
• You can create documentation for a large user base, potential for increased project visibility and adoption.
• Requires understanding of chosen documentation tool syntax
• Free plan displays ads on documentation pages.
• Public documentation might not be suitable for all projects.

Here’s a review we found on g2 by Dan.D:

“The best part is using your existing development workflow to maintain and deploy your documentation. The whole idea is that you can manage your documentation just like you maintain the code. Their build and hosting make is simple to just add docs and get them online.”

If you're looking for a free, well-maintained platform with essential features for managing your open-source documentation, Read the Docs is a strong contender. However, if you require advanced customization, privacy control, or dedicated support, you might need to consider paid alternatives or self-hosted documentation solutions.

D. API Documentation Tools

• Software Type - Open-source, cloud-based development tool
• Pricing - $21 Per User/Month

GitHub, the online world's code haven, is like a social network for software. Imagine storing your project files, tracking changes, and collaborating seamlessly with fellow developers on one platform. That's what GitHub offers. It uses Git, a powerful version control system, to rewind, compare, and merge code changes.

• Versioning: Create distinct versions of your documentation for different audiences, environments, or software releases.
• Code Snippets and Embedding: Directly embed code snippets within your documentation for clear illustration and reference.
• Community and Resources: Leverage a vast community of developers and technical writers for help and inspiration.
• GitHub being free and open-source offers affordability and community-driven improvement.
• Markdown support simplifies writing and editing documentation.
• Search and discoverability features increase access and awareness of documentation.
• Technical learning curve may demand initial effort to grasp Git and the platform's intricacies.
• GitHub isn't tailored explicitly for documentation, potentially necessitating customization or additional tools for advanced features.
• Documentation on GitHub isn't inherently public unless explicitly set to be so.

Here’s a review we found on g2 by Allona.F:

“GitHub helps me and my team to collaborate on our project easily. Sharing and syncing of our project is also a plus point for GitHub, we can do our work at anywhere the same time. We can also share our past projects with the public for others to get a reference, also we can get some references from other developers much easier.”

GitHub is a powerful and versatile platform for software documentation, offering version control, collaboration, integration, versioning, and more. However, it's not a dedicated documentation tool, so some technical knowledge and potential customization might be needed. Carefully consider your needs and resources to determine if GitHub is the right fit for your software documentation project.

• Software Type - API Interactive Documentation
• g2 Ratings - 4.3/5
• Pricing - N/A

Apiary.io is a platform specifically designed to help developers design, develop, and document APIs. It offers tools and features to streamline the entire API lifecycle, from conception to deployment.

API stands for Application Programming Interface. It's a set of rules, protocols, and tools that allow different software applications to communicate with each other. They allow developers to build on existing platforms, leverage external services, and create new functionalities more efficiently.

• Interactive Documentation : Presents API documentation in a user-friendly and interactive format.
• Testing Debugger: Enables debugging of API tests for improved reliability.
• Automated Implementation Testing (using Dredd): Automatically tests API implementations against API descriptions.
• RSS feeds for API changes: Notifies users of updates and changes to APIs via RSS feeds, enhancing communication and transparency.
• Use the industry-standard format for describing APIs, which can also be adapted for some software documentation.
• Great for teams who want a collaborative environment while collaborating on documentation.
• Helps developers understand software behavior through interactivity before implementation.
• Not built specifically for general software documentation, so some features might not apply directly.
• Smaller compared to dedicated documentation platforms.

Here’s a review we found on g2 by Shubham S., Technical Director:

“Apiary has a perfect user interface that makes it easy to understand the software. I also love the option to create a group to work together on a single API. Apart from these, options like API documentation, validation, and editing of API are of great help!”

Apiary.io offers valuable features for collaborative, interactive documentation, but its API focus might not perfectly fit all software documentation needs. Consider your specific requirements and team setup before choosing it. If you mainly need basic documentation with interactivity and collaboration, it could be a good option.

E. Markdown Editors and Writing Tools

16. doxygen.

• Software Type - Documentation generator and static analysis tool
• Capterra Ratings - N/A
• Free trial - open-source software/free to use
• Pricing - Custom pricing

Doxygen is a widely used and free, open-source tool that helps developers automate the process of generating software documentation. It parses specially formatted comments embedded within your code, extracting information about classes, functions, variables, and more. This information is then used to create comprehensive documentation in various formats like HTML, PDF, and LaTeX.

• Structured XML Output: Offers structured XML output for parsed sources, usable by external tools for further analysis or processing.
• Fast Search Engine: Includes a fast, rank-based search engine for efficiently finding specific elements within the documentation.
• Cross-Platform Support : Doxygen and the generated documentation are platform-independent, working across different operating systems.
• Saves developer's time and effort by automatically generating documentation from code comments.
• Generates visually appealing and informative documentation with diagrams, graphs, and tables, improving understanding.
• Doxygen isn't just for C++. It supports various programming languages like C, Python, Java, C#, PHP, and more, making it versatile for diverse projects.
• Poorly commented code leads to poor documentation. Maintaining comments can be time-consuming.
• CHM file compilation is only supported on Windows, requiring alternative methods for other platforms.
• Client-side search is limited to symbols, not full-text searching.

Here’s a recent review we found on Sourceforge:

“Awesome documentation generator for C/C++ code!!”

Doxygen is a powerful tool for automated code documentation. Its visualizations help developers quickly grasp complex code structures. However, initial setup might require configuration and a learning curve, especially for complex projects.

17. MarkdownPad

• Software Type - Windows-only MarkdownEditor
• Free trial - Free Version Available
• Pricing - Costs $29 for a lifetime license.

MarkdownPad is a text editor specifically designed for working with Markdown documents. It simplifies writing in Markdown through easy-to-use formatting tools and provides a live preview of the finished document. Markdown is a plain language with a simple syntax for creating formatted text like headings, lists, quotes, and code blocks.

It's popular for writing documentation, blog posts, notes, and more, converting easily to HTML for online publishing.

• Live Preview: MarkdownPad displays a real-time preview of your document as you type, allowing immediate visualization of formatting changes.
• Easy-to-use Formatting Tools: MarkdownPad offers a user-friendly interface with intuitive buttons, menus, and shortcuts for effortless text formatting using Markdown syntax.
• Support for Multiple Document Tabs: MarkdownPad Pro enables simultaneous work on multiple documents in separate tabs, which is ideal for efficiently managing large projects with frequent file switching.
• Export to HTML, PDF, Word, and RTF for different publishing needs
• Compatibility with GitHub Flavored Markdown
• Highlighting code snippets enhances readability for technical readers.
• The free version has limitations like document size and no export to PDF.
• If cross-platform compatibility is crucial, MarkdownPad might not be ideal.

Here’s a review we found on their official website:

“MarkdownPad saved my life writing API documentation for work. Best software I've used in a long time.”

MarkdownPad is a strong contender for creating and managing software and technical documentation, especially for individual users or small teams prioritizing a user-friendly Markdown experience with live preview and basic formatting needs.

How do you choose the right software documentation tool?

Upon scrutinizing the 17 software documentation tools listed above, you may have observed some recurring features. Here's a concise rundown of essential features to prioritize in a software documentation tool:

• Editing Capabilities: Evaluate the range of editing features available. The more appealing your documentation appears, the greater the user engagement and willingness to learn.
• Quick Start Documentation: Seek tools with readily available templates to expedite the documentation process, allowing you to focus on content rather than design from the outset.
• Brand Customization: Ensure the tool allows customization to reflect your brand identity, including options for incorporating your logo and brand elements.
• Reporting Functionality : Look for tools that provide comprehensive reports offering insights into the performance of your articles and areas for improvement.
• Integration Capabilities: Prioritize tools that seamlessly integrate with external platforms such as ticketing systems, chat applications, surveys, and analytics tools. The ability to integrate effectively demonstrates the tool's versatility and is essential for efficient workflow management.

Quick suggestion: Consider exploring contextual guidance as a feature in software documentation tools. It integrates support directly into the user interface, offering task-specific assistance through features like tooltips, message boxes, and popups.

In wrapping up, all the software documentation tools we've discussed have their own strengths and weaknesses. However, Gyde stands out with its two offerings under one roof: the digital adoption platform and the screenshot guidance extension, catering to different documentation needs.

Recap in a Nutshell:

• Gyde's Digital Adoption Platform provides in-app documentation for employees to train on the job. It is best for creating personalized walkthroughs for different application workflows and building a centralized knowledge base with bite-sized help articles.
• Gyde's Screenshot Guidance tool is best for tasks involving the documentation of browser app processes or app-related FAQs. This free AI-powered Chrome extension simplifies guide creation with clear and visually appealing instructions.

Regardless of which option you choose, Gyde prioritizes ease of use.  The intuitive features are complemented by exceptional customer support.  Furthermore, they prioritize data security and ensure compliance with relevant regulations.  

This combination positions Gyde as a premium and affordable software documentation tool.

What are some best practices for writing software documentation?

• Write in plain language, avoid technical jargon.
• Use clear and concise instructions.
• Structure your documentation logically and use headings and subheadings.
• Include screenshots, diagrams, and videos for visual learners.
• Keep your documentation up-to-date with changes to your software.

How to get started with a software documentation tool?

• Most tools offer free trials or plans to get you started. Explore their features, read reviews, and see which one best suits your needs.

What are the different types of documentation that can be created with these tools?

• User guides and manuals
• API documentation
• Developer documentation
• Knowledge bases
• Release notes

What is the difference between process documentation tools and software documentation tools?

Process documentation tools focus on capturing and illustrating business workflows and procedures, while software documentation tools are geared towards documenting technical aspects of software development projects such as code, requirements, and user manuals.