Maybe Our Documentation "Best Practices" Aren't Really Best Practices

Technical Writing

Recently I discovered that a supposed documentation "best practice" may not actually stand up to scrutiny when measured in the wild. I'm now on a mission to get a "was this page helpful?" feedback widget on every documentation page on the web. It's not the end-all be-all solution, but it's a start towards a more rigorous understanding of what actually makes our docs more helpful.

Intended audience for this post

Anyone who writes technical documentation and publishes it to a website.

Introduction

Technical writing is full of "best practices" that supposedly improve content quality:

And so on. These are random examples I pulled from memory. Replace them with whatever "best practices" you actually adhere to. I'm wrapping all of these "best practices" in quotes to suggest that we don't really know if they're actually best practices.

Sure, for some of them, we can point to that one user study that John Carroll did 15 years ago for Minimalism Beyond the Nurnberg Funnel, but how do we know that the principle holds up today, across the global community of documentation readers on the web?

Or take Strunk and White. You may have noticed that I slipped some of their "best practices" verbatim into the list above. I'd wager that most of our "best practices" come from that little grey book. But those guys didn't write that book for technical writers. And I'm pretty sure they did no research whatsoever. Some of their recommendations, like "do not explain too much", might be downright counterproductive when applied to technical writing. Yet when an aspiring technical writer asks what books they should read to learn our field, that's one of the first that we point them to.

Or maybe we're relying on research from other disciplines, such as design or human-computer interaction. Which is a great start. But considering that the web affords a lot of opportunities to measure the sentiment of our readers, why not at least check that these best practices from other disciplines carry over well into ours?

This question of whether thse "best practices" actually result in more helpful documentation recently became more important to me because I encountered some data that calls the "best practice" of "shorters docs are better" into question.

I'm coming to suspect that the data might not actually support this belief. For example, I recently put a "was this page helpful?" feedback widget on hundreds of docs at developers.google.com/web. Here's an example. We've been collecting the data for several months, with hundreds of responses for each doc. Here are our top-performing pages, after filtering out pages that had less than 500 responses:

  1. Inside look at modern web browser (part 1)
  2. Get Started With Viewing And Changing CSS
  3. JavaScript Promises: an Introduction
  4. Pause Your Code With Breakpoints
  5. Address Bar Matches Brand Colors

Our top performing page, Inside look at modern web browser (part 1), is somewhat long. Top performer #3, JavaScript Promises: an Introduction, is quite long. Both posts also defy other "best practices". The Promises doc is full of humor and blends content types, for example. By "content types" I mean the guidelines that technical writers use in order to decide how a tutorial, guide, reference, and so on should be structured, how much information it should have, and so on.

So maybe this data is a clue that our "best practice" of "shorter is better" is not really true. Maybe the true best practice is use as many words as you need to in order to completely explain your topic and just make sure to keep your readers entertained and engaged along the way. Or maybe "shorter is better" holds true for most docs, and this is just a quirk of my team's audience, web developers. We simply don't know yet. That's my whole point!

Does any of this matter? Well, let me answer this question with some questions. Does your company screen out applicants whose writing samples don't look like pages from Strunk and White? Is "conciseness and brevity" one of the factors of promotion? Do you structure your writing teams around these notions of "quality"? I.e. do you spend time editing docs to be shorter? How would you feel about those practices if we found out that there's no meaningful connection between conciseness and how helpful our actual users perceive a doc to be?

In other words, what if we've been optimizing the wrong things?

Measuring best practices

A true best practice improves the quality of a page in a measurable way. If it doesn't measurably improve a page and we still want to do it, that's fine. But we shouldn't call it a best practice. We should call it a convention. And we should prioritize accordingly.

I should also note that I'm focusing on best practices in the context of page quality as measured by our users. Maybe "shorter is better" is still a best practice in the context of team productivity. I.e. a shorter doc is faster to edit.

I'm proposing that we start measuring quality by adding a "was this page helpful?" feedback widget to pretty much every technical documentation page on the web.

From an implementation perspective, I have a few reasons for focusing on "was this page helpful?" widgets:

In terms of what's in it for you as a technical writer consider these provocative bullet points:

Actively validating best practices

Once you've got a "was this page helpful?" widget on every page, how do you use this data to actively validate a "best practice"? The key is to treat your content updates like scientific experiments.

For example, suppose that one of your teammates just left the company, and this person was notorious for using needlessly complex words. You inherited this person's docs. You subscribe to the "best practice" that simpler words are better than complex words. This is your opportunity to find out if simpler words create any meaningful change in the perceived helpfulness of your docs:

  1. First, let the original docs collect data for a while. You need a benchmark to compare your changes against.
  2. Make your changes, and then let the updated docs collect data for the same general amount of time as the original docs. The key is to keep the changes isolated. If you introduce a bunch of changes all at once, you won't be able to definitively say what kind of impact each change had.
  3. Compare the benchmark data to the new data.
  4. Share your findings with the rest of the technical writer community.

Step #4 is why I'm writing this post. If we cultivate a culture of active experimentation in our docs, I think we can collect enough aggregate data to begin to understand what kinds of changes meaningfully improve perceived helpfulness. Maybe you're already doing this. To my knowledge, most teams aren't. We could collectively really benefit from more technical writers sharing their research.

A single docs site probably won't be able to generate enough data in order to draw conclusions. But if we run the same general experiment on hundreds of sites, I think we can. It may not stand up to the scrutiny of true scientific experimentation, but I think it will give us a more informed stance than the status quo. Our approach will get more sophisticated and rigorous over time.

As another example, yesterday I added a lot of content to our Optimize Images guide. Here's before and after if you're curious. The implicit "best practice" here is "more detail is good". I've set a reminder to check back on the doc in 2 months to see if more detail did in fact improve the helpfulness rating of the page.

Noticing patterns

In some cases we may not need to actively experiment with our docs in order to draw conclusions. Take the "shorter is better" example I mentioned in the introduction. I didn't have to do anything, other than collect the data. As long as enough docs sites are collecting "was this page helpful?" data, we may already have enough data to be able to draw a general conclusion that the shortness of a doc is not correlated with any meaningful change in perceived helpfulness. This will require a lot of sharing of data, and I'm not quite sure how that would work yet, but it's definitely on my radar.

I think that the methodology for figuring out whether the length of a doc correlates to perceived helpfulness looks something like this:

As a first step, I'm working on getting these widgets across all of Google's documentation. Perhaps in the future I'll be able to write about any general insights that we've discovered.

Your TODOs, should you choose to accept them

I'm excited to see what we learn!