A good user guide is concise, structured, and filled with visuals. We've put together an actionable and simple strategy you can use to save time when creating user manuals.
Adelina Karpenkova August 29, 2024
Say I want to guide customers through my company's product functionality. Where do I start? Installation instructions? A troubleshooting guide? Feature description? The amount of work ahead of me is overwhelming.
Before I can put together a neat but comprehensive user manual, I’ll need to spend a lot of time defining priorities, talking to customer support and figuring out what our customers need (and not just what I think our customers need).
We're here to make the process of writing a user manual painless for you and everyone involved. I've put together a list of different types of user manuals, highlighted our must-have features, and broken down the project into easy steps to save time.
Plus, we've provided free, customizable templates for you to use as a starting point.
A user manual is a set of instructions that guide users through a particular product. It has many names:
Whatever the name, it’s an inevitable part of your external knowledge base. A user manual is written by product team members in collaboration with customer support, sales reps and a marketing team, with a final touch from an experienced writer.
User documentation isn’t limited to feature descriptions or installation guides. There are plenty of user manual types:
You may not need all of them, but good end-user documentation is always a combination of several types of user manuals.
Regardless of the complexity of your product and user experience level, a basic user manual typically includes at least three sections:
This is a solid starting point for every product team. If you offer additional features for tech-savvy customers, like API or webhooks, you’ll add API documentation, maintenance guides or other forms of technical documentation to your knowledge base.
You may omit setup instructions if you have in-app tutorials and welcome product tours built into your product interface.
Grab our simple user guide templates and start creating stunning user instructions in seconds.
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Help end users get the most out of your product with our free, customizable user manual template, which includes step-by-step user instructions on:
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With our customizable instruction manual template, you can:
🆓 Customize this instruction manual template for your product.
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This software user manual template is a helpful tool for creating online user manuals, fast.
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Provide clear instructions on how to use your software with this free user guide template:
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This training manual template is a fast way to:
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This versatile step-by-step guide template is a helpful tool for creating clear instructions for any task or process.
In seconds, you can create a well-structured, sequential step step-by-step guide that helps end users quickly and easily complete tasks.
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Scribe's AI platform pairs ChatGPT's powerful language model with your specific processes — simply:
. and Scribe will auto-generate a comprehensive manual specific to your company's processes and tools — in seconds.
Creating a user manual that’s easy to follow can be a challenge.
Have you ever tried to assemble a drawer using the manufacturer’s instructions? If you’ve never had a couple of “unnecessary” elements left after the work is done, you must have hidden talents (why do I have so many extra screws?!). User manuals are often confusing and fail to achieve the key purpose — creating a seamless product experience.
Before we provide you with helpful tools and best practices for building your own user manuals, let’s look at some outstanding examples from other SaaS companies.
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Scribe (yours truly!) is a user manual software that automatically captures digital processes and creates step-by-step guides that are easy to edit, share and collaborate on. You can embed your Scribes in your knowledge base or publish them right within Scribe Pages.
Here's an example of a user guide from our Scribe community that was created by Streamline Healthcare Solutions:
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Why are we telling you this? We’ve created detailed user manuals with the help of our own product!
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The Scribe Help Center is filled with auto-generated instructions, guiding users through every process inside the platform, from installing the product to managing the team’s access settings.
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Smartlook is analytics software for product teams. That’s why Smartlook’s user manual focuses on technical details, like fix-it guides and integration setup walkthroughs.
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The manuals are well-structured and searchable, making it easy for end users to find necessary information, fast.
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ClickUp, a project management software provider, offers a range of user manuals for customers with different product experience levels. For new users, there’s a very detailed overview of all product features and terminology.
Often, product teams focus on guiding customers through critical workflows within a product, but they forget to explain what the name of this or another feature or workflow actually means. ClickUp makes its interface more intuitive by guiding users through the key terms and concepts they’ll face when using the product.
Whichever topics you cover in your user manual, the following features should always be present in the document.
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A user manual must be easily accessible from your website and product interface. Use a meaningful heading and link to it in the most prominent places so users can turn to it whenever they have a question or face a problem.
You can also link to a specific manual next to a product feature you want to explain in more detail. It’s a good way to provide on-demand training without pressure.
For instance, if you use Scribe to create user manuals, linking to relevant Scribes or Scribe Pages right from your product interface will help you speed up user onboarding and improve customer experience.
And don't forget search engine optimization! According to PwC's June 2023 Global Consumer Insights Pulse Survey, 54 percent of consumers use search engines as their primary source of information when making purchases.
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Every user manual needs a table of contents. When being able to switch between different sections and topics in one click, end users will find solutions to their problems, fast.
🔥 What's the fastest way to add a table of contents? Automate it! Scribe adds a complete, clickable table of contents of your section headings to your online user manual with one click.
Provide a glossary for all terms and acronyms in the product interface in your user manual. Use plain language in your content to make it easy to read, reference and digest.
When possible, present your manuals in the form of step-by-step instructions and include a maximum of three sentences per paragraph.
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There’s no need to go overboard — a combination of plain text and simple visuals is a good design for your user manual. And remember — the simpler, the better.
While searching for inspiring user guide examples, we discovered that a lot of top-notch SaaS companies don’t include visuals in their end-user documentation.
Look at one of ActiveCampaign’s help articles. The company’s comprehensive knowledge base has perfect structure and contents, but it lacks visuals.
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Users have different communication preferences. Some may find it easier to remember information and follow instructions that have a screenshot, video or GIF visualizing the product interface.
Use a similar layout across all your user manuals. It will create consistency and add clarity across your product documentation.
When a lot of people are involved in the creation of help content, there’s a high risk every stakeholder will bring their own vision, tone of voice and writing style. To avoid it, encourage your product team members and everyone involved to follow a template and your style guide when creating user guides.
💡 That's where our free user manual templates come in! Try our customizable templates to create a standardized layout for your manuals.
The way you see your product differs dramatically from the way your customers see it. What you may find too obvious may be absolutely baffling to product users, and vice versa.
That’s why a perfect understanding of your audience’s expertise level, priorities and pain points must be a cornerstone of your end-user documentation. A great user manual is one that not only answers common questions but also foresees questions they don’t know how to formulate yet.
Writing user manuals doesn’t have to be difficult. Here are the seven best practices you should follow to nail the process.
There’s some prep time before you get down to writing user instructions. First, you need to understand who you're writing for and identify the problem.
Hopefully, you already have an idea of your customer personas, but it’s time to dive even deeper. Define your users and try to answer the following questions:
If you already have product data, analyze it to discover where your users need assistance the most. For example, while watching session recordings, you may reveal your customers don’t understand how to follow certain workflows.
Once you define your users and understand what they want to see in your manuals, make a list of all the topics that come to your mind. You don’t need to categorize them — you’ll do it later. Just write down everything you want to cover.
After analyzing your audience groups, you’ll have an idea of what manual types you need to create. But you can’t work on all of them at once.
To prioritize manuals, answer this simple question: who is your most valuable customer? Once you find the answer, you’ll know what type of user manual you should write first.
Say you sell CRM software with email marketing functionality. While marketers do fit your customer personas, large sales teams bring more value. In this case, you’ll start with sales automation workflows and other sales-specific features first.
GIFs, screenshots or videos? It’s good to focus on the type of visual content you’ll be including in all your user manuals.
Of course, you can create different types of content for your users, but it’s best to plan for your user's communication preferences. For instance, GIFs and screenshots are the most common visual content formats used in end-user documentation, while video tutorials fit well in certification programs and academies (e.g., ClickUp University).
We’re almost there — and this prep time will pay off. It's time to map out your future content.
Start by creating top-level categories and a logical hierarchy for your user manual. After you’ve analyzed your user personas, you must already have an idea of how to segment your documentation. Often, companies split user manuals by their customers’ job roles and expertise levels. Alternatively, you may group your help content by product feature or use case.
When you’ve outlined the categories, look at the topics you came up with earlier and group them based on common features.
Next, break down each topic into sections to briefly define what every manual will cover and avoid overlaps.
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Finally, you can write your user guide. If you have a multi-functional product and several customer segments, the process will eat up a lot of time. Unless you optimize it.
Automation tools like Scribe are the fastest way to create user manuals while you work. All you have to do is turn on the extension and walk through the steps of any product, software or workflow.
I use Scribe to capture my web and desktop processes and auto-generate a step-by-step user guide in seconds with:
With Scribe Pages, you can combine multiple guides and ask the AI to write your manual with a simple prompt.
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Then add videos, images, GIFs, and more to create a beautiful user manual.
You can create folders, configure access rights and manage your manuals from inside the Scribe workspace.
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Share your Scribes or embed them in any knowledge base with one click:
Don’t have a knowledge base? No problem! All team members with login credentials can open the reader view on Scribe Sidekick, which immediately gives them access to any guide for the web page open on Edge or Google Chrome.
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If you use Scribe, you won’t need to do much user instruction writing. To provide context for your guides, you can include a glossary and a FAQ section right in your Scribes or Scribe Pages.
"Shoutout to @ScribeHow for making User Manual creations a breeze.
Plenty of hours saved in creating How-to Guides and User Manuals in the last 2 working days!
Thanks ScribeHow for making such a useful product!" — Vivek Agrawal
Do your manuals help real users? Is there anything you could add? Continue to monitor the usage of your help content to answer these questions and create user guides (and a customer service experience) your customers love.
Documentation software typically provides statistics on how users interact with content, but it’s not enough. Here’s what else you can do to improve your user manuals:
Update your manuals when you receive feedback or spot content gaps — and don’t forget to delete irrelevant content. When you publish new content, come up with a way to distinguish it from other user manuals (what about an emoji? 🌟 ) to attract users’ attention to it.
If you want to create an excellent customer experience, add user guides to your to-do list. But you don’t have to spend too much time on it. Develop a consistent process you’ll follow from ideation to user feedback collection, and you’ll maintain up-to-date end-user documentation with no effort.
And with a process documentation tool like Scribe in your toolkit, you won’t spend a minute manually writing user manuals. Download our free user manual template and start creating stunning user instructions in seconds!
