Q: After both reading and writing documentation, what do you think is necessary to create good documentation? What documentation will you and your project lead need to create for your Vivero project – and what steps do you need to take to make this happen?
I think a good understanding of your audience is important to create good documentation. While it can be helpful to create documentation that with the assumption that your reader has now knowledge of the tool, it can be hard to use if someone already has some basic familiarity with the tool. I chose to write documentation for using PowerPoint, and since I assumed that the reader would have no knowledge of PowerPoint at all, I could describe the basic steps of creating new slides, inserting text, and so on. But if instead someone who knew a little PowerPoint wanted to know how to include features like transitions, additional design elements, or animations, it would make more sense to make documentation specific to these tasks. So I think knowing what your readers need from your documentation can be very helpful.
For my Vivero project, one of my main goals is to have good documentation for the website I am working on, since I won’t actually be around when the website is in use. It’s important for me to leave clear documentation behind so that people have a point of reference when they need to change or fix things in the site before or while it is operational. Once I start working on the actual website (as opposed to the draft version) I plan to record all of my steps in as much detail, and include a troubleshooting section for issues I may have faced and how I went about solving them.
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