The importance of documentation to the user experience

Crafting a stellar user experience should be the ultimate goal of any software developer. It isn’t exactly easy to craft such an experience, but it is easy to avoid making the experience needlessly awkward and difficult.

One of the most important aspects of crafting a user experience is documentation. Documentation will tell your users everything that they need to know to get started with your software, how to use it, and what to expect. Here are the precise reasons that proper documentation is so important.

A Sign of Maturity

Having proper documentation for your software will mean that your users have a better experience. If there is no documentation to help users get started with your products, it won’t just make them think negatively about the product, it will be a poor reflection on your business as a whole.

Releasing software without any documentation is something that you might expect of a freeware developer, someone who is giving the software away for free and maybe hasn’t got around to writing proper documentation. Perfectly forgivable in the circumstances.

But can you imagine a major corporation pulling the same stunt? Take Altium as an example. Altium.com makes printed circuit board design software for businesses. A 1-year subscription to Altium costs more than $7,000, can you imagine if you paid that much money and didn’t even get documentation to help you get started? Of course, Altium is a mature business and its documentation happens to be excellent.

Guiding With Knowledge

When you write documentation for your software, you can choose what information you impart to the user and in what order you give it. This means that you can guide them through your software while still leaving them in control of the experience. Your documentation should serve as a guide, leading users through your software in the way you see fit.

If you don’t produce your own documentation, it will be up to your users to teach one another, producing their own guides and tutorials. While this is generally a good thing, a lack of official documentation can mean that users have a much harder time getting to grips with your software than is necessary.

Reducing Frustrations

We have all been users ourselves, and it’s a safe bet that we’ve all turned to documentation to help us get to grips with software or hardware in the past. So you probably also have a good idea of just how frustrating it is when any software is not properly documented. Trying to use a complicated bit of software with lacklustre or non-existant documentation is, at best, a needlessly time-consuming experience.

Imagine if your IKEA furniture came without any instructions on how to assemble it. Sure, for the most basic pieces of furniture, this isn’t an issue. But for anything even mildly complicated, this would be incredibly annoying.

Save Time

Time is valuable, most of us rarely, if ever, can afford to set aside the time needed to work out how to use software without any guidance. In fact, if users can’t find any documentation for your product, they might just go to one of your competitors rather than wrestling with a confusing interface. Proper documentation means that they can get started as quickly as possible.

Properly documenting your software is vital if you want your users to have the best possible experience. Businesses that don’t properly document their software will pay for it in reduced sales and a negative impression of them in the minds of customers.