Peter Marklund

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Fri Apr 07 2006 00:52:00 GMT+0000 (Coordinated Universal Time)

Quote of the Day

Thanks Jarkko for highlighting the following nice quote from the article Two more reasons why so many tech docs suck which argues the case of getting your users excited and using use cases for technical documentation:

One of the best techniques for creating and keeping interest is to make non-reference docs use-case driven. That way, each topic is framed by a context that matches something the user really wants to do. That way, each little sub-topic shows up just-in-time, instead of appearing to be there just-in-case.

It makes a lot of sense to me to organize technical documentation by the readers goals, i.e. to use the howto or cookbook approach. The Perl Cookbook is a great example of how this approach can be successful. In that instance the use-cases are on a very low level such as "How do I iterate over an array" but the approach should also work on a higher level, i.e. "How do I setup a weblog". High level use-cases like that are probably best broken down into smaller use-cases.