How to Write Software Support Handbook

How to write a software support handbook? Or what are the elements of a software user manual for an excellent user experience?

Software Support Handbook

An excellent software support handbook requires the following elements:

• introduction: writing purpose, project background, terminology, and acronyms;
• software overview: software goals, software functions, software performance;
• software instructions: installation, use, error and recovery, help inquiries;
• Operation instructions: operation steps;
• operation command list;
• user operation examples.

There are many things that need to be included in the software user manual. For users, an efficient and simple user manual is the best experience. So how can we be simple and efficient? Just make an online user manual. When the operation encounters problems, Visit the website directly, search for related problems, and you can find solutions, which greatly reduces the time of looking through the manual and asking after-sales.

In fact, many users now prefer self-service. You can choose a simple and easy-to-use online help center, product manual, knowledge base and publish it on the website. Users can directly click on the website to access the content without other cumbersome steps.

Understand the core keywords

First of all before writing, you need to understand the core keywords “simple” and “efficient”. The user manual itself is to help readers better understand and use the product. If it is so complicated that it requires brainpower and time to understand, then this user manual has no meaning.

Determine Who Use Software Support Handbook

Secondly, it is important to determine the target users of this manual and what the needs of these targets are. The focus of different target manuals may be completely different.

For example, an Internet medical product, when facing patient users, should focus on how to quickly find doctors and hospitals; when facing doctor users, it should focus on how to better use core functions, such as prescription, Inquiries, etc.; when facing operators, it should focus on explaining the value of the product to users, and the process and requirements of using the product to help them better promote; when facing internal customer service personnel, then It should focus on the detailed rules and procedures of the product to help it better serve users.

Confirm the purpose of the user Handbook

Third, determine the purpose of the user manual. For external publicity, or use guidance. Handbooks for external promotion tend to describe more macroscopic content and more value-oriented. The instructions for use are more step-by-step instructions.

Choose the Handbook format

Fourth, How to Write Software Support Handbook? choose the format of the user manual suitable for the product: graphic, video, etc. When choosing, comprehensively consider product style, cost, and user usage scenarios (video requires higher network requirements).

Planning the overall structure

Fifth, plan the overall structure of the user manual, which generally includes product background (as simple as possible), functional descriptions, logical processes of core functions (non-task processes), common problems, etc., which are written in modules. Above, a relatively simple and easy-to-use product user manual can basically be completed.