Here is early access to the latest episode on the Cherryleaf Podcast – Interview with Anne Gentle, author of Docs Like Code and Product Manager at Cisco. It will be published on the podcast channel on Monday. Topics covered: What is docs as code? Why do it? When might this approach might be applicable? The limitations… Read more »
Category: Technical Documentation
The ROI of user documentation: you could break even if you avoided 3 support calls per week
We’ve been experimenting with another spreadsheet for calculating the Return on Investment (ROI) on User Assistance. We wanted to look at: how many support calls an organisation needs to have resolved by users reading the Help content instead of calling Support, before it starts to see a return on the cost of creating the Help. Using… Read more »
Every Page is Page One – Interview with Mark Baker at UAEurope 2017
Here is an interview we carried out with Mark Baker, author of Every Page is Page One. The interview is interspersed with audio snippets from Day 1 of the UAEurope 2017 conference. Presentations: Caroline Loverage (Thermo Fisher Scientific). Teaching by Example: Worked Examples in the Documentation of Complex Systems Kelly O’Brien (Kayako). Practical Information Architecture: Building Templates… Read more »
Just in time documentation – some pros and cons
Bri Hillmer has written two articles on Just-In-Time documentation (https://www.knowledgeowl.com/home/just-in-time-documentation-a-practical-guide and https://www.knowledgeowl.com/home/just-in-time-documentation). This is an alternative to what she called Just-In-Case documentation. The idea is you write topics that answer real world queries users ask the Support team. This rather than writing a comprehensive user guide, just in case someone wants to know about topic… Read more »
What is the minimal amount of user documentation you should write?
In researching what developers wanted to learn about writing documentation for users, the most common issue related to how much, or how little, they should write. One developer said: “I would want to know what is the minimum I should write. If you can persuade me what is the necessity of each thing I’m capturing, and… Read more »