Guide Strategy

User guides help a user achieve a goal. They show a user how to solve specific or common problems they might face within your product.

A strategy to Guide Structure

The best way to structure guides is to take a user through the steps involved, with directions to solve an end goal. For example, how to import contacts or how to create a user.

When you are writing guides, think of a user that already knows some of the basics or has some expectation of your app. This is a bit different than tutorials, so be careful not to confuse to purposes and intended end user of each.

Name them well

The title of a how-to document should tell the user exactly what it does. So, it is important to use a meaningful title name and a descriptive and meaningful description.

Problem or Concept

Define the problem at hand for the article or the concept of the general objective of the article. This is the fundamental building block of the app function and what it is setting out to achieve.

Also, describe how this function operates to solve or process the solution at hand and what the various configuration settings and parameters are.

Analogies

If necessary, use an analogy to make some sort of further explanatory point. You can use metaphors and similes when creating an analogy to compare the current function under discussion with any other related commonly used function in the industry.

How the user guide is to be applied for the Application.

1. How-to guides must contain a list of steps, that need to be followed in order.

2. A tutorial video showing adding and configuring the step could exist here.

3. How-to guides must focus on achieving a practical goal.

4. A how-to guide must address a specific question or problem.

5. A how-to guide should not explain things or concepts.

6. Leave things out to make it practical and usable so it is more valuable than completeness.

Examples

Sometimes it is advantageous to add some form of example to illustrate any of the settings or options in use.

Alternate information

See Also

• If this article is related to other articles in some way then mention it here.

Limitations and known issues

• If any limitations are apparent or if there are issues that may apply to certain scenarios then we'll describe them here.

Useful Tutorials

• At times there may be other tutorials that could be useful to this article or for knowledge in the bigger scheme of things.