Creating Useful Documentation

Knowing the product

Okay, this one is a no-brainer.

The more exposure you get to a product, the more familiar you become with it, and the more you'll understand how the product works. You will get a feeling for what users will need to know about the product. You will also start to learn workarounds and little tricks that make the product particularly enticing to users (marketing loves this sort of thing). You will also learn trouble spots and begin to develop an intuitive feeling for areas that need careful explanations and areas that you can glide through with little explanation. This experience goes a long way in helping you to decide what to include in documentation and what to leave out.

I know that there are some technical writers who think that knowing a product or service is a detriment. These technical writers seem to feel that they lose the ability to see from the perspective of a new user if they know too much about the product they are writing for. I don't agree. Knowledge can only make documentation better, unless the writer has problems writing for a target audience. But then, that's a problem with the writer, not the knowledge.