A comprehensive documentation methodology,
a powerful computer-based content management system,
and a series of in-depth training programs
If your product can be described as equipment, a tool, or a system — if your customers or staff need to be given some guidance in working with it — you need to provide some kind of user instructions. Your product may be industrial machinery, office equipment, or domestic appliances; it may be computer software, administrative procedures, or even board games. The user instructions and support documentation may be simple booklets, hefty manuals, or on-screen "help" displays. In every case, the user’s satisfaction with your product depends largely on the effectiveness of that documentation.
Effective User Documentation enables the user to find information quickly, understand it easily, use it confidently, and get the right results. But how often does it work that way? How often have you or your staff wasted half a ream of paper (not to mention half an hour of precious time) because your photocopier manual didn’t clearly explain how to get exactly the right combination of features? How often have you missed taping a TV show because your VCR manual didn’t clearly explain how to set the timer controls?
Brandle’s Methodical Approach to User Documentation helps to ensure that user documentation positively contributes to customer satisfaction. More: it facilitates the efficient development of documentation, and supports development and maintenance of different versions of documentation — for different product ranges, or in different languages for different markets — with confidence that all customers are being told the same story.
Note that the word "user" has a broad interpretation: it means anyone who has to work with the product or service. That includes "end users", support staff, developers of new versions or upgrades ... in fact, anyone who needs to understand either what the product or service is, what it does, or how to use it.
A "methodology" is simply a standardised, formalised way of carrying out a process. It should provide these benefits:
- A way of defining your objective
- A way of defining the steps required to reach your objective
- A way of carrying out the steps and monitoring progress
- A way of validating the results.
The Methodical Approach to User Documentation does all this, and more. It provides:
- Techniques for analysing documentation needs: what information users want, how they will use it, how it should be expressed
- Techniques for determining documentation content, structure, style, and appearance
- Tools for setting up, estimating, and controlling the documentation project
- Full consistency with AS 4258.
Analysis and design must be based on careful, thorough research. The results of research will, to begin with, be a collection of documents:
- Product specifications
- Notes taken at interviews
- Test results
- Answers to questions
A major use of these "source materials" is to provide the information that is passed on to users in the finished documentation.
When a new version of a product is planned, when a fault is corrected or a refinement developed, the product specialists will be unable to point to every place in the user documentation that must be changed. They will, though, be able to point to the changed specifications.
If detailed records exist of how each item of source information is used in the finished documentation, it is then a simple matter to locate all parts of the user documentation that need to be changed.
An effective methodology must be as complex, in its way, as the process it controls. The Methodical Approach has been designed as an integrated whole, and it incorporates many features to make it as easy as possible. But there’s a lot of it. Successful implementation of the Methodical Approach is dependent on thorough training in all aspects of the methodology. Training programs have been structured to achieve the greatest benefit for the least time and cost.
The programs cover different aspects of the Methodical Approach for different groups:
- Implementation is for every member of the team
- Administration is for managers and project leaders
- Content Management System is for users of the computer-based tools.
Each program combines a strong practical approach with rigorous attention to underlying theoretical principles.
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Copyright
© Brandle Pty Limited, 1997-2006
Last modified: September 22, 2003
