Objective
- Write useful end user documentation for your project.
Assignment
You are going to create end user documentation for your system and submit this documentation. Here is what you need to know on writing end user documentation.
1. Users are task oriented – Your documentation should document what can be done with your software and lead the user through the steps to complete that task.
2. Tasks should be easy to find – Users will want to easily find the instructions to complete what they need to do, so you need to make these easy to find – there are many techniques to do this and you will be required to participate in a discussion about the goods and bads of user documentation on the discussion board.
3. Users Need Visuals – You can save a lot of verbage with a single screen capture.
4. Assume Nothing – Microsoft violates this all the time with things like the first line, Bring up System Settings – well how do you get to system settings? Assume your users have no idea how to do anything and explain everything.
I am sure you can find much more guidance on user documentation, but I am going to look for logical flow of how well you guide a user through something they may do with your software. In larger projects there will be a dedicated (and well paid) person writing the user documentation.
You can submit this as a pdf or as an online document.