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A comment on Four kinds of documentation.

Re:Four kinds of documentation by lallysingh on Friday October 18, 2019 @07:52AM (#21290510)
Yes, this is critical stuff!! I've seen a lot of effort put into unguided documentation efforts that put out huge, unapproachable times that helped nobody.
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Re:Four kinds of documentation by arjenschat on Friday October 18, 2019 @08:59AM (#21290973)
Indeed. We have simple process to create maximum support impact with minimal effort in documentation.

With every support request we ask ourselves: Why is this person contacting us? Is there a simple ui change or wording to prevent confusion. Basecamp coined the term "wordsmithing" for this endless process of fine tuning. [1]

Only after we are happy with the amount of support request a feature generates, we document it.

Doing it this way has a couple benefits. You kind of create a long term user test. You can't spoil the user with knowledge from documentation. There is no way you can give hits to the user to perform a the task. With every support request you can multi variant test your explanation.

[1] https://signalvnoise.com/posts/3633-on-writing-interfaces-we... (2013)

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