The traditional form of help documentation is a hard copy manual that is printed out, nicely bound, and functional. It serves as a reference manual - skim the TOC or index, find the page, and follow the directions step by step. The challenge with these types of documents is that user manuals can often become jumbled and hard to understand. And in an effort to fix this issue, writers can try to employ what I call "look over here" techniques to minimize the wordiness and simplify the content.
I have found this approach to be extremely ineffective most of the time. Why? Because user manuals are not meant to be flipped through 10 times for one task. That is what online help is for.
So how can we create a good user manual?
Well, we do so by dividing the content up and presenting it in a self-contained manner. In this way, ALL of the information necessary to perform that task is present in that section of content. Take this basic scenario of a sample page from a user manual, and see if you can tell what's wrong with it:
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How to Format a User Manual
