User experience Theory: the user experience of product documentation

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A lot of people have told me that in the process of product design, the most annoying is to write a variety of product documentation. On the one hand, to emphasize the speed of the Internet products, join this link, will reduce the development speed; On the other hand, when the product positioning, conceptual model or prototype has been formed, the document writing work is quite boring, no fun; More importantly, the documents you write may not be read at all.

I thought so at the earliest. Product formation and then laborious to write product positioning, functional design What is the significance, not to mention the important processes and rules have been marked in the prototype, why superfluous. But a few projects down, I found that the document still has its own function, if the maintenance of outstanding, will be a good helper of the product design staff.

• The use of documents to systematically think about product positioning or prototyping design. when we meet to determine product positioning policies, user policies, it is usually done in a fairly lengthy discussion. If there is no document collation, it is unavoidable that members of the product team have neglected aspects of decision making, and it is difficult to get a systematic description of the scattered annotations in depth into the prototype design. I have often found irregularities in the design of prototypes when writing PRD documents. Early detection of defects modification, than the later recovery nature can save a lot of time.

L Document Writing is also a technical job. how to write to let the reader, with less time, clear understanding of the product strategy and design details, is a very elegant thing. Isn't there a lot of people complaining about the documents they're writing that no one reads? You have to think about it, whether it's just a code word for manual labor.

L The record of the product idea, it is available to check. Many people will say that I have a good memory, the product of all aspects I can remember, need not document records, the difference is not small. But not everyone in the team has such a good memory. I believe a good memory is better than a bad pen. When the product is to do related template version of the association development, the details of the rules in the module need to know exactly. This time, the retrospective function of the document can be fully demonstrated.

Just like making a product, you need to consider the different needs of the various readers of the document. I think some of the techniques are worth exploring:

1. Summary grouping + Small title

There is a more famous principle of "7±2", which mainly means that the number of ideas or concepts one can understand at one time is limited, at a maximum of 5-9 projects. Therefore, we need to set the point of view according to a certain logical relationship group. and use it to summarize the main points of view of this paragraph so that the reader can begin to understand your point of view in the first few seconds of reading this paragraph.

2. template is not to make the document uniform

Many companies in order to standardize the product, reduce the project members read the document learning costs, have produced a corresponding product document template, the specification of different product design staff writing style. But the product personnel because according to the content different nature, should be flexible application template. Take PRD as an example, to host content information-oriented pages, and interactive communication based on the page will be a major difference. The description of the display content, mainly elaborates the display field, the extraction rule, the sorting rule, the link address and the way and so on, but the form class description, more emphasis process and fills in the rule description.

3. can use a chart without a table, can use the table without words

As described in the small title, the reader will always have a higher degree of acceptance of the graph than the text. The 07 version of Word provides a SmartArt feature that gives us great convenience and allows you to make full use of the various types of diagrams in it to express your views.

4. documentation also requires typesetting

Typesetting has many skills, such as message, spacing, font size and color contrast. A very comfortable document, the viewer will be quite easy to find the point. Here is an article about how to typeset ppt, and many principles apply to word--how to design a comfortable ppt(upper)(the next).

5. return to your document reader

In fact, many people have unconsciously done this thing. Every time I finish PRD and sync it to the technology and testers, I ask them what they read and make adjustments based on their feedback. Some people have trouble, in fact, this link in general you only need 1 hours to be able to handle.

In short, you need to make different adjustments depending on the nature of the document, the content, and the different browsers. The process is more than just a simple statement of ideas.