Testing the documentation
The best documentation is one you don’t even need because your product is so simple and easy to use. However, to help any users having difficulty, there should always be a description of how to use it. Ideally, most users will never need to refer to it; if they can work out the product from its interface alone, they don’t need documentation, and that’s great. The docs are there for when things go wrong.
Testing the documentation first involves specifying what types should be present, and there is a wide variety to choose from:
- Static manuals
- Tooltips
- Help web pages
- Instructional videos
Traditionally, documentation would be a physical manual describing each aspect of the application’s functionality piece by piece. Years ago, that would be printed on a dead tree; more recently, it would be a file you could download, but both options have been superseded. Manuals are slow to put together because you need...
