Try a Quick Reference Guide for Short-Term Documentation Needs

Friday, January 30th, 2009 | Team Dynamics, Technical Communication

Because I work on a family of applications that are being developed to replace a legacy program, sometimes my work of documentation and training directly supports the transition from legacy to new. Part of the development team’s replacing and enhancing the legacy functionality is providing a series of reports on data in the systems.

One of my assignments is to provide some documentation that will tell the users how to use the new report prompts and parameters to obtain certain result sets that they have gotten with the legacy reports. My concern with this request is that it is essentially throw-away documentation. Other material I’ve created that relates to this transition period has been around for months and even years now. But we’re getting close enough to turning off the legacy system that I hesitated to produce documentation with a life of only a few months.

When I talked to the program manager about this task, he mentioned the fact that it was a short-term need even before I could. Since the User Education Team is trying to promote our quick reference guides, I decided that this would be a good area for one. The user will say, “I need this kind of report,” look for the legacy name, and see a line-by-line matching of how to get that report with the new functionality. Sounds like quick reference material to me.

So there’s one benefit of quick reference guides: As long as you don’t spend hours and hours on the design, it can be a way to satisfy a short-term documentation need. Some instructions say, “Keep these instructions,” and how many of us actually do that? Others are designed to be used once and thrown away. If you know something is going to be discarded after one use or will serve its purpose over a limited time, consider using a quick reference guide.

On that note, Tom Johnson and I will be presenting in May at the Society for Technical Communication’s Summit in Atlanta on the subject of determining good situations for creating quick reference guides and designing them. We hope to see you there. If you have any questions that you would be interested in having us answer, comment here. We are also interested in seeing examples of quick reference guides, so links to those are appreciated, too. Thanks much!

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