How to do documentation right

  1. Document while building your project, or making changes. If you treat documentation work as a post-project step, it’ll never get done.
  2. A Word of Powerpoint doc is okay to use for one-off pieces of documentation, but consider building a documentation knowledge-base in an internal wiki or similar tech that’s lightweight, searchable, and easy to update. It’ll be more of a pleasure to update, and your end users will appreciate the forethought too.
  3. Animated gifs can convey more meaning and save you time – Rather than building an elaborate diagram or a massive wall of text, a simple screen recording set to save in a .gif (that’s pronounced with a hard G, despite what the media tells you) can tell it all.
  4. Consider your audience when determining the depth of detail – Too often documentation is treated like technical schematics when the most likely reader is a business user. Make sure you’re not over-complicating the message for the main audience. If both deep and a shallow views are needed, consider creating separate documents entirely.