{"id":421,"date":"2012-07-18T05:17:00","date_gmt":"2012-07-18T12:17:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.finditez.com\/blog\/?p=421"},"modified":"2026-03-09T05:44:37","modified_gmt":"2026-03-09T12:44:37","slug":"top-5-features-of-a-user-guide","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.finditeasy.com\/blog\/top-5-features-of-a-user-guide\/","title":{"rendered":"Top 5 features of a great software user guide"},"content":{"rendered":"

Software user guides are good and useful, as long as they are well done.\u00a0 What makes them great?<\/p>\n

\"FinditEZ-Main-Screen\"<\/a><\/p>\n

    \n
  1. No fluff<\/strong>.\u00a0 Cut to to the chase.\u00a0 Answer this question succinctly “how do I do this?\u00a0 … or that?”.\u00a0 Don’t fill a user guide with marketing jargen or unnecessary content.<\/li>\n
  2. Relevant Examples.\u00a0 <\/strong>Know your audience.\u00a0\u00a0 Provide real-world use case examples to describe precisely how to accomplish a given task.\u00a0 When possible, these should come from actual customer support inquiries.<\/li>\n
  3. Some pictures please<\/strong>.\u00a0 A picture paints a thousand words.\u00a0 Where appropriate, use some product screen shots for illustration and explantions.\u00a0 Plain words and instruction are not always as effective.\u00a0 Don’t be tempted to over-use screen shots though as you UI can change making this difficult to manage.<\/li>\n
  4. Just the right amount of links for navigation.<\/strong>\u00a0 Make it easy to navigate the guide, including listing relevant topics, a table of contents, glossary and index.\u00a0 However, don’t over-use in content links as it can be distracting and disjointed to follow all links.\u00a0 Your end-users can may be led astray, begin jumping around and not get the answer they were looking for in the first place!<\/li>\n
  5. Keep it current.<\/strong>\u00a0\u00a0 Guides can quickly become “stale” as a software evolves through releases.\u00a0 Ideally, review and update your guide with each software release.\u00a0 Better still, publish new user guide release editions with each minor or major software product release to benefit those customers who have not yet upgraded.<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n

    Find it EZ is about to publish user guides<\/a> for its full product line.\u00a0 Software change made simple.<\/em> ™<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

    Software user guides are good and useful, as long as they are well done.\u00a0 What makes them great? No fluff.\u00a0 Cut to to the…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":592,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[25,26,27,18],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-421","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-pro-desktop","category-pro-server","category-365-enterprise","category-product-hints-tips"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/www.finditeasy.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2019\/12\/banner.png","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.finditeasy.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/421","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.finditeasy.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.finditeasy.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.finditeasy.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.finditeasy.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=421"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.finditeasy.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/421\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.finditeasy.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/592"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.finditeasy.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=421"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.finditeasy.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=421"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.finditeasy.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=421"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}