How to Make Your User Manuals More Searchable
User manuals are worth reading if its content is such an informative one and where your ideas are delivered properly and effectively. It must contain the necessary details that hook up your reader’s interest. With this, it will aid your readers with the right information that they are looking for and for them to have a clearer of what your topic is all about.
So, how are you going to write a user manual effectively? As we all know, in order to make a certain task a successful one, there are rules and techniques that they need to follow. And for you to write a user manual correctly and a winning one, you have to apply some writing techniques that will make your piece a better one. But mind you, don’t take this task for granted. There are a lot of people who are not competent enough to write a successful user manual. But with the perseverance to follow the techniques in writing and your creativity on developing your ideas will help you to achieve a worth reading user manual.
User manuals and technical documents are among the most difficult materials to write. Not only should they express complex technical concepts in simple terms, they should also make it easy for users to find what they’re looking for.
Since most manuals are now available both in print and digital format, it gives the reader more flexibility when trying to find the information they’re looking for. Also, it will help you to write conveniently and just focus mainly on your writing task. Unfortunately, it also means extra work for the writer who’s in charge of creating the document.
When people want to look for information, their tendency is to use words that are familiar to them. Since you have no hand in your readers’ overall language facility, it’s up to you to try and cover as much as you can to help them out. That means anticipating what the users will look for, apart from putting together a clear guide (with the help of a quality writing software) for them to use.
So, what’s the easiest way to approach this problem? Here’s something we recommend and for you to apply it into writing:
– Define the core concepts for each page of the manual.
– Draw up various terms that correspond to these same concepts (i.e. it means the same but written differently, similar to the synonyms of a word).
– Integrate all the terms you come up with into the sentences and paragraphs in the page.
Better to do these things while you are writing a user manual before you are going to submit it later on. Do you see the value in that? Since you can’t really know how users will look for specific concepts, your best chance of success is to try to cover all your bases. While you aren’t likely to anticipate every possible thing they can search, you should manage to score many of them – and that’s usually better than the majority of guides available out there.
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Category: Writing
Keywords: technical documents, technical writing, user manuals