Effective Development of User Documentation

We cover the process of creating user documentation for software products, such as document structure, the rules for outlining and formatting, and documentation quality criteria.

  • duration 16 hours
  • Language English
  • format Online
duration
16 hours
location
Online
Language
English
Code
REQ-028
price
€ 450 *

Available sessions

To be determined



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Description

Most of you may know the phrase: "If everything goes wrong, read the guidelines at last." But how should you write guidelines so that everyone would like to read them – even before something goes wrong? How can you make it more informative for both experienced users and neophytes?

 

A project can be considered successful if it provides a solution that creates a certain value for the customer. And this value has several dimensions. First of all, this is a direct satisfaction with customers' business needs, of course. However, there are some indirect things that affect customers' businesses as well. For example, how fast can new employees study the solution and use it without errors and delays? If this process takes a long time, customers could lose money or maybe be deceived by clients. Well-designed user documentation can help to avoid such unpleasant situations because employees (users) would find in it all the needed descriptions, instructions, tips & tricks to do their job correctly and quickly. So, user documentation is one of the project's important deliverables.

 

This course covers the entire process of creating end-user documentation – from first defining its structure to reviewing and publication. A lot of attention is paid to various aspects of correct wording and formatting of text. Students will be asked to analyze and correct numerous examples of clumsy phrasings from different sources: documents, ad messages, and news.

 

Writing technical documents (such as specifications, requirements, etc.) is not an inherent task for technical writers, yet they should be able to understand such documents and retrieve necessary information from them – for writing end-user documentation. Therefore, this course is also focused on one of the forms of requirements description: use cases, which can be easily transformed into step-by-step instructions for users.

 

We are surrounded by lots of bad text samples, but after this course, participants will be able to reduce its quantity by producing readable, well-structured, and useful documents.

 


After completing the course, a certificate is issued on the Luxoft Training form

Objectives

The main objective is to equip students with the knowledge and skills required for creating user documentation for software products.

Upon completion of this training, they will be able to:

  • Define requirements for documentation and apply them;
  • Improve the skill of correct presentation of information;
  • Apply the rules for document arranging and formatting;
  • Identify and correct typical errors in technical documentation;

Use advanced tools for text formatting (MS Word).


Target Audience

  • This course is oriented towards technical writers, including beginners.

    It can also be useful for Business and System analysts who often are involved in developing a lot of documents.

Prerequisites

For proper comprehension of the training program, students should have:

  • General knowledge of the software development process;
  • Experience in using word processors and other text-processing software.

Roadmap

Topic

Theory, min

Practice, min

1. Quality of documentation

· Technical writer tasks

60

20

· Requirements for documentation

50

20

2. Stages of documentation creation and types of work

· Creating documentation as a part of SW development project

30

20

· Stages of documentation development

30

· Assignment for documentation development

15

3. Types and structure of documents

· Different types of technical documents

30

· Document form and structure, types of information

40

· Use cases

70

40

· Developing the document functional part

15

· Developing the reference and descriptive parts of documents

15

· Structure-driven sections

15

4. Text elaboration and arrangement

· Basic principles of information presentation

120

30

· Examples of poor-quality texts

40

· Document layout

40

· Differences between Russian and English language documents

40

· Descriptions for specific elements

40

· Ensuring document quality

40

30

5. Technical writer tools and resources

· Recommendations for using MS Word

40

40

· Additional web resources and useful tools

30

720 (75%)

240 (25%)



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