Last week I wrote how the prominence of documentation usually indicates a hard-to-use product. This led to the obvious question – should companies just invest in usability and ignore documentation? An interesting proposition. My boss and I often claim that our aim should be to make documentation redundant – talk about shooting oneself in the foot.
It is wishful thinking that we will be able to do away with documentation completely. Even WhatsApp has a Help Center. Products will always need straight-line documentation for legal, reference, and completeness requirements.
But generative AI (GAI) opens up the opportunity for us to leave the straight-line documentation to a bot, while the documentation team focuses on higher-level content. For instance, a software has the following features:
· Group users by different categories – most frequent user, least frequent user, new users in the last three months, and so on
· Design mailers
· Send mailers
· Track user visits by date
These four features would be built by three different teams. There would be how-to articles to help users use these features, such as:
· Create user categories
· Design a mailer
· Send out a mailer
· Track user visits
These would most probably be separate articles with no obvious connections in the documentation. This is where most product documentation is lacking. We don’t tell our users how they can identify customers who have stopped coming to the site, engage with them, and retrieve the lost business.
Well-written product specification documents will allow GAI to generate the straight-line scenario documentation. The technical writing or product documentation team must step in to add information about impacts, considerations, and gotchas. Apart from this, the team must create articles that allow users to get the full benefit from the product.
For instance, most people know that they can send files in a WhatsApp message. But what many may not know is that they can use the Send file feature to share high-quality images without losing fidelity. It is this kind of information that we should be sharing with our readers to really add value.
A move to this kind of deeper documentation has repercussions on how we recruit. It will no longer be enough to be able to write procedures on a feature. Instead, the optimal technical writer will be one who is curious about the product and one who works on the software like an end-user.
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