Ever wonder how to cut a birthday cake? Me either. But obviously someone out there who scored a few points lower than me on their IQ test thought they were doing a great service to the community by providing this ridiculous diagram on the cake boxes from Giant Eagle stores in Pittsburgh, P.A.:

I am all for good documentation. Not only does it provide me with an income and a job that I love, but I can honestly say that after two years of working at Tech-Tav I really do believe in its value. I have seen how good documentation saves money and increases sales by reducing support calls and providing great customer service to end users. But in some cases, when we oversimplify things, we run the risk of offending our users and unfortunately justify our reputation as wasters of the world’s tree supply.

Please, if your target audience is electrical engineers, remove that section from your User Guide explaining how to use a mouse. If it were still 1992 I would agree that it’s justified, but not anymore. I recently saw a video tutorial online that included these instructions: “To play video, click the arrow.” If I didn’t know that the arrow was a play button, I’d have bigger problems than the tutorial would have been able to solve.

I don’t know about you, but I am seeing documentation  everywhere these days, both great and, well, less than great. Have you seen some ridiculous documentation around? Send it to me and I’ll post it on our site.

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Tech-Tav technical writers believe that you should bin this year's documentation projection RIGHT NOW! Here's why…

1.       You're not even thinking documentation! What the heck are you doing? Gant charts, product releases, management. Documentation is in there somewhere. We'll get round to it, right? You should reassess your strategy. Start thinking of the documentation as a co-pilot to your product. It needs to be awake throughout the journey, supporting your product and arriving at the same time.

2.       You're not even thinking about the customer! Is your kind of documentation the kind the customer wants and needs? Does it speak to your user? Have you gotten any feedback on documentation? Have you even asked?

3.       You're not even thinking about your own company! How is your documentation going to help your company? What are your most common support calls about? How can you preempt these calls by giving the answers away in your documentation?

4.       You're certainly not thinking about your prospects! Documentation …making us money?! In an article in Forbes, Aaron Fulkerson states "Some companies that I have spoken to are reporting that their documentation is bringing in over 50% of their qualified leads". 50%! And that's not to mention how much traffic and lead generation documentation generates on the company website.