by Silva Payne

Created on: April 05, 2010

When you are new to any job, having a well-written manual or procedure guide to help you through those first few days can be invaluable. Imagine being expected to operate an important and complex database or ordering system with just 10 minutes of training on your first morning. Manuals and user guides are crucial, yet often overlooked business items. If writing such a manual or guide for procedures is part of your job, a few tips on how to produce the best documents are sure to be useful.

The first step in writing a manual is for you to understand the equipment or processes yourself. It may be possible for you to give an overview when you have a sketchy understanding of how something works. However, if you are required to write a user manual or list of procedures, you will need more than a basic understanding of the operation about which you are attempting to instruct a new user.

If you only use certain parts of the interface functionality for example, spend some time working through every other part of the system. Make notes on what things do and how they relate to the commonly-used features. Try working on some test documents and make sure you can explain how every tool and application work.

It is always best not to assume any prior knowledge when writing a manual or set of procedures. If the document is to be part of a suite of training aids, you will have no way of knowing who may need to use those in the future.  Use language that is easy to understand by everyone, and avoid the use of abbreviations and colloquial terms that may be confusing to new members of staff. For example, an “SLA” may be obvious to you, but a new employee may not know that it means a “Service Level Agreement”.

Set out your manual in a logical sequence of use. Start, predictably, at the beginning of the task that you are describing and work through each step methodically. If you get to a point where 2 or more options are possible, make sure you describe each one and give reasons why a user may chose one option over the others. Give any troubleshooting advice at each step rather than at the end of the document. Users will find it easier to negotiate issues in sequence, rather than trying to follow the manual steps and having to also find the relevant troubleshooting advice somewhere else in the document at the same time.

Wherever possible, use visual prompts and diagrams to reinforce the text. Screenshots of each stage of the process if it is on-line

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