Creating documentation menus and navigation

So far, I’ve spoken about how to organize the content of individual pages but not about how to organize entire pages. How do you structure a collection of documentation pages?

This is a hard topic, and not even an experienced technical writing team has all the answers to it. Fortunately, most tools let you move and rearrange content structures relatively easily, so it’s typically an ongoing experiment rather than something set in stone.

If you ask users what they want in terms of document site navigation, the answer is typically one large Google-style search box, as in truth, no one is sure what sort of navigation would help them find what they want and achieve the same for everyone else. If you ask different team members or teams, you’d probably end up with a menu with a long list of all the content. So, in reality, documentation site navigation is a continual experiment, at best consisting of compromises built...