Sample user manual for software product

Use simple, plain language whenever possible to help your customers understand even the most complex concepts. It sounds like a no-brainer, but writing in plain language about a product or service you know front-to-back is more difficult than you might think.

Write the documentation in an easy-to-read way. Keep documentation as simple as possible to achieve its goal. Long blocks of text and pages tightly packed with written and graphic content can make user guides or manuals feel intimidating and unfriendly.

Customers who are intimidated by your user materials are far more likely to call your support team for help than they are to try to solve their questions on their own.

Visual content, including images, annotated screenshots, graphics, and videos, quickly shows someone how your product works. Recent research from TechSmith shows that people actually absorb visual information faster and perform tasks better when instructions are provided with visual or video content.

Visual content also helps break up long blocks of text and can help eliminate a lot of the text that makes many user guides or manuals feel intimidating and unpleasant. Popular ways of including visual content in user documentation include screenshots , screen recordings , tutorial videos , and more.

Have you heard of simplified graphics? Sometimes called simplified user interface or SUI , simplified graphics take images of a user interface or other graphic and — just as the name suggests — simplifies them.

Every product solves a problem. Naturally, this will involve product features, but highlight them in the context of helping the user get to the reason they bought your product in the first place — to solve a specific problem.

For example, our Camtasia and Snagit tutorials yes, tutorial videos can be a form of documentation highlight specific features, but they do so in the context of why someone might use that particular feature.

Good documentation needs a hierarchy of headings and subheadings that lets a user know what each section will show them. And that hierarchy should follow a logical flow that helps the user learn to use your product in the most helpful way. Start with the easy stuff first and then, as your users build their knowledge, show them the advanced features. A table of contents provides your customers a simple, efficient, and familiar way to quickly find a solution to their question or problem.

It should include all the major headings and subheadings as described above. There was a time when most user documentation was printed. Now, in an era where just about everyone has access to a smartphone, it makes more sense to create electronic documentation.

Like a table of contents, searchable content gives users easier access to your content and helps them find solutions on their own. Create accessible content. This means ensuring that electronic documentation adheres to standards of accessibility for people who may be blind or visually impaired, deaf or hard of hearing, or may have cognitive disabilities. Remember, many of your customers need this to understand and fully access your user documentation. Design materials with your customers in mind.

Make it usable and friendly. Avoid long paragraphs of text or pages that are packed too full of content. Allow for white space to help break up the monotony and make the prospect of learning a new product less daunting. Include graphics and images as much as possible to show rather than tell your customers how to use your product.

For electronic documentation, use video and GIFs. Use consistent fonts and complementary colors across multiple documents. Snagit templates make it incredibly easy to create professional-looking user documentation from a series of screenshots or other images. Snagit comes with a bunch of free, professionally designed templates, and with TechSmith Assets for Snagit , you get access to a ton more!

Learn their pain points and try to address them as best you can. Find out what they tell you is needed to know to best use your products. This can be done by creating a user profile, also named a persona. With a persona, you make some reasonable assumptions about the characteristics of your user.

This is not only useful for creating your user instructions, but it is an essential element at the start of the development of any product! As an educated industrial design engineer, this is how we started all our design assignments.

You can use the template yourself to determine who your user is. Action: Use the template to describe your user s. I am a HUGE fan of visualizing things. So if you want to take defining your user one step further, I would suggest you visualise your user in the form of a persona. When creating a persona you are giving your user a name, age et cetera, so it becomes a real person that represents your user. Typical problems might include: installing the product, using the product, using the product safely, maintaining the product and disposing of the product.

I asked Philip to identify the problems and solutions that his user might encounter during the product lifecycle. In order to do so, I created another template for Philip. Our user manual templates are compliant with this standard. Action: Use this template and the instructions on the first tab to identify the problems your user might have during the lifecycle of your product and present their solutions.

Philip has now identified the problems a user might have with his product during its lifecycle and he has now thought of the solution to solve the problem.

In other words: Philip has defined the topics for his user manual. Each topic can only be about one specific subject, has an identifiable purpose, and must be able to stand alone. A user wants to solve one problem at a time. A topic will become a section in the user manual. It can be a chapter or a sub- paragraph. As soon as a user is looking for an answer to his problem, he will use the table of contents to find out how to navigate to that answer.

I asked Philip to structure the topics and define their place in the user manual, by assigning a certain topic to a specific chapter or sub- paragraph. You have now created the Table of Contents ToC. The ToC is the outline of your user manual. Each topic in the user manual gets its own heading. The headings are the sub- titles that precede the actual text. They appear in the ToC, so the user can navigate to the needed information.

Because the ToC entries play such an important role in helping your user find their way, and to help them skip what is NOT important, they need a bit more attention. Basically, you should try and work with three levels of headings: first-, second- and third-level headings.

The first-level heading describes what the entire chapter or section is about e. A third-level heading uses noun-phrases e. Packaging contents and Tools to be used. Meaningful Headings tab. Dependent on the market where your product is placed in or put into service, and dependent on the product group your product belongs to, specific legislation applies to your product.

These requirements also include requirements on the content of your user manual and safety instructions. In order to sell your product in a specific market, you should make sure that your user manual complies with these requirements. These two articles below will tell you how you can find out exactly which legislation applies to your product for the European and U. Pro tip: when there is a Declaration of Conformity available already, you can find the applicable directives in there.

Philip didn't need to conduct these steps, as the template he used already contained the legal content as required by the relevant directives. For his product, it means that the following information is required for the user manual for his product:. This standard has been harmonised in the EU. Compliance with harmonised standards provides a presumption of conformity with the corresponding legislation! I have also created an IEC checklist that can be used to double check that your user manual complies with this standard.

In order to create an internationally compliant user manual, you should always make sure your manual meets the EU, US and requirements. I asked him to adjust the table of contents of the template according to his own table of contents. Without removing and mandatory elements of course Do you remember from step 4 that I asked to start the numbering of the sections with chapter 4?

Once you download the user manual template doc yourself, you will see that a few standard chapters have been added, as well as some appendices. The purpose of your product, or better: the intended use, is the heart of a user manual and forms the basis of ensuring the safe and healthy use of the product. The way the intended use is described also determines your liability and affects the further contents of the user manual. The most legislation requires you to include a description of the intended use in the user instructions.

The international standard for user instructions, the IEC , provides the following definition for the intended use:. An exhaustive range of functions or foreseen applications defined and designed by the supplier of the product. By describing the intended use you determine the safe envelope of the product. And once you have determined the intended use, you can focus on providing only those safety and user instructions for how to use the product within the given envelope. Additionally, to the intended use, many more standards, directives and regulations also require you to include a description of the reasonably foreseeable misuse.

For example, the reasonably foreseeable misuse of an aggressive detergent could be the use of it in a food processing environment. Paying too little attention to describing the reasonably foreseeable misuse will affect a company's liability. If the defectiveness of a product needs to be determined, all circumstances will be taken into account. That includes the reasonably foreseeable use of the product.

The description of the intended use determines which instructions are given in the rest of the manual. For example, if a cooling system is only used for cooling certain medications, then only these procedures need to be described.

When it could reasonably be foreseen that the cooling system may be used as a system to cool organs, this should be described in the instructions. By doing so, you, as the manufacturer, will limit your liability and you can focus on only describing how to use the system to cool medicines. Figure 1. Reasonably foreseeable misuse? Even though the intended use has now been clearly defined, this does not mean that using a product is completely without any risks.

To identify the hazards that come with the use of a product, you can conduct a risk analysis. A risk analysis can also be mandatory for certain product groups, such as low-voltage equipment, toys, machinery and equipment for use in explosive atmospheres.

Standards, like the ISO , have been developed on how to conduct a risk analysis. According to this method, there is the following hierarchy of risk-reducing measures:. This means that the user guide should warn of any residual risks related to the use of the product. This is done with safety warnings. A good safety warning describes the nature of a hazardous situation, the consequences of not avoiding a hazardous situation and the method s for avoiding it.

Rotating parts. Risk of serious injuries. Keep hands clear. Then you want to warn the user where a hazardous situation might be encountered. Do this. Do that. This is embedded safety messages. General text general text general text. In the EU, depending on the kind of product, it might be allowed to provide only the safety information in printed form and the rest of the information online.

Action: conduct a risk analysis and craft your safety messages using this template. Now I asked Philip to create all other content, such as the procedures, technical specs and legal information. Again, for most product groups there are paid templates available which might make the work easier. These templates contain all legal texts, mandatory disposal information, copyright statements and comply with the IEC standard on user instructions.

When using the template for crafting the safety messages, I asked Philip to indicate whether a safety message is a supplemental directive, or should be placed as a grouped, section or embedded safety message.

A user manual should give assistance to people by providing information about how to use a product. The table of contents should also include all the major headings and subheadings of the document. There is a major benefit to creating electronic, interactive user manuals that live online. Users can search such documents and find and access them quickly. In many cases, they can skip the table of contents altogether, although you should retain it in the document for others who prefer to find advice this way.

Nobody enjoys unreadable pages crammed with small text and product diagrams that you can hardly see. If you make the design clear and engaging, users are more likely to get value from the documentation. Following these simple rules will yield user documentation that resembles your brand and looks nice and familiar to customers.

End the user manual with a list of additional resources to assist a customer, should they need such information. Got it. Why Stonly? Use cases. Solutions Self-serve support. Product adoption. Support agent performance. How it works. Knowledge Base. Stonly Widget. Customer knowledge base. Add guides to your KB. Chatbot alternative. Custom contact forms. NPS survey. Feature adoption. Scripted agent guides. Internal knowledge management. Help Center.

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