Designed for Use

Talk About Tasks

Whether you’re writing the manual, writing a blog post, or recording a screencast, it’s always a good idea to talk about tasks, rather than features.

Documentation often simply explains how the individual features of a product work. But unless you are creating the most basic of products—say, an alarm clock—explaining individual features is not particularly helpful. People don’t want to learn how to use features; they want to learn how to do things. People have goals, and they use your product because they think it can help them reach these goals.

For example, rather than describing in your blog post how layers work in a photo editor, explain how to frame a photograph and add cool effects to it—and include layers in that process. ...