I mentioned the other day that I was working on some quick-start guides that a stakeholder asked for in our training structure. When he described something that he had in mind, I said to myself, “Quick-start guide.” This deliverable takes a different mindset than help systems or other types of documentation. I’ve decided that quick-start guides and quick-reference sheets must be a minimalist’s dream.

The point of a quick-start guide is, as the name says, to help the users get on their feet as fast as possible. This requires the writer to ask, “What is the absolute minimum that someone needs in order to get started?” The next best question is “What is the user going to do the most often?”

This has been a switch for me, and I like the challenge of having to take a different tack on something and think a different way. I think it is beneficial to be writing these guides after I’ve done dozens of help topics and performed training sessions because I have this repository of knowledge now that I can strain through a sieve. If I were doing quick-start guides first, I’d probably have to gather a bunch of information and still try to decide what’s in and what’s out.

It’s a terrible thing to think that a quick-start guide may be all that someone ever looks at. But it’s better than looking at no documentation at all. And I’m sure that minimalists will insist that you’ll scare off users if you dump a pile of documentation on them. I tend to walk to the middle of the road, so I wouldn’t say to give users every minute detail about the system, but I do believe in providing more than the bare bones “just in case.”

However, I do agree that single sheet of information is nice and inviting, and the words “quick-start guide” tell a user that he can, in fact, get started quickly.

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As an aside, I’m doing these guides in InDesign. I’m somewhere between a newbie and intermediate with this program. I discovered today that I can click and drag an image file from Windows Explorer into an open InDesign document, and it appears just as if I’d used File > Place and gone hunting for it. Sweet.