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<\/p>\nBefore you start writing, even before you think about content, format and technical details, you must first identify your audience.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
While you can\u2019t imagine every reader who may eventually pick up your manual or consult your online support, you can profile your ideal or typical user, a kind of avatar who summarizes who you want to address.<\/p>\n
To start, list (in order of importance) the types of people who use your product. Are they tech-savvy developers? Product distributors or salespeople? Factory floor managers? Technicians or repair people? Figure out who they are or at least who most of your users will be and start with that group. Remember: this avatar can profile real users, but it should be aligned with your marketing goals to also represent the potential users you want to attract to your product.<\/p>\n
Now, get to know these typical users. Making sure your document addresses them directly is key to creating effective documentation. To find information on your ideal users, take a look at your target industry and think about who your current users are (perhaps marketing surveys and other sources of consumer information will also be of help). You\u2019ll want to learn about their:<\/p>\n
When you understand who you\u2019re talking to, you can also adjust to your audience\u2019s comfort level. For instance, when addressing experts in the field in a manual, you\u2019ll use industry-specific terms and imply advanced concepts. But explaining user-friendly procedures in simple terms will be a better strategy with a consumer who is a beginner or a one-time user. Creating documentation adapted to your users\u2019 comfort level will also support your sales team, since hesitant buyers won\u2019t be convinced by highly detailed technical documentation and your typical engineer will be annoyed with a flashy user-friendly graphic interface, for example.<\/p>\n
How you orient your documentation will also vary according to where your product is in its lifecycle, since different types of users will be attracted by different versions of your product. For instance, if you\u2019re documenting brand new software, early adopters\u2014maybe programmers on the cutting edge looking for new solutions\u2014won\u2019t need the same level of support as the less-savvy users of a mature and market-tested item. Often, early adopters are the kind of users who like to play around with a product, try to understand it on their own without reading documentation on the how-to of specific tasks. A general explanation of the concepts will suffice. However, a more \u201cgeneral public\u201d user may need more detailed information and hand-holding through procedures.<\/p>\n
Now that you have a clear idea of who you\u2019re writing for and where they\u2019re at, consider creating one document per typical user. Called \u201csegmenting,\u201d this is an especially useful technique when your documentation is long or complex. It is applied intuitively in some cases. Rarely are distributor and user guides combined in one document, for example. However, many times, you\u2019ll need to make a conscious effort to simplify your documentation. In fact, a common mistake is creating general documents that try to cover everything for everyone. And, as a result, they don\u2019t do anything for anyone!<\/p>\n
Though segmenting content for different audiences may seem like more work, it will make for much more effective documents. And, don\u2019t worry, if you use the proper content management software to create your documentation, you\u2019ll be able to recuperate and reuse chunks of content in other documents, like building blocks.<\/p>\n
This said, you may have reasons not to split up your document. Perhaps it\u2019s short and sweet already or limited budgets or human resources make managing various versions more trouble than it\u2019s worth. That\u2019s okay. You can still apply the segmenting principle. Just divide your content into specific sections, clearly focused on specific readers. That way, your ideal lusers will identify their needs and go directly to the information that is relevant to them. For example, when the content is well structured and labeled, administrators will flip to their section, while operators know that it won\u2019t be relevant to them<\/p>\n
By thoroughly identifying who you\u2019re talking to and addressing your ideal users clearly with several audience-specific documents, you\u2019ll provide what your readers need and help them find it quickly. Who would have thought identifying your users could have so much impact on your documentation?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Before you start writing, even before you think about content, format and technical details, you must first identify your audience. Your typical users While you can\u2019t imagine every reader who may eventually pick up your manual or consult your online support, you can profile your ideal or typical user, a kind of avatar who summarizes […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[26,23],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-355","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-technical-communication-strategy","category-technical-writing-and-documentation"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lios.dev.creationsunivers.net\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/355","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/lios.dev.creationsunivers.net\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/lios.dev.creationsunivers.net\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lios.dev.creationsunivers.net\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lios.dev.creationsunivers.net\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=355"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/lios.dev.creationsunivers.net\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/355\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lios.dev.creationsunivers.net\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=355"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lios.dev.creationsunivers.net\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=355"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lios.dev.creationsunivers.net\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=355"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}