Consider what performance support resources need to be available to trainees as they progress through their learning transfer journey from novice to expert. Then, consider what ongoing support resources will be needed, after they have become proficient through practice.
This means you need to do a lot more than just make the existing current procedures and documentation available at the point of work. You should chunk the information and prioritise it in a way that makes it useful at the point of work.
For performance support, consider the pyramid approach for content presentation used by many professional writers.
The first point of contact with performance support is the apex of the pyramid. This is the small bit of information that will solve most of the problems. It’s surprising how many times the help desk gets asked the same question time and time again. If this initial snippet is not enough, they will need to access the next, broader layer of the pyramid, which has more information. Perhaps this time it is a list of frequently asked questions or some how-to videos. After that comes another layer, which could be a user guide or user manual. Under that perhaps another layer again with broader information, and references to other documents. After they have been down these ever-expanding levels of the pyramid, if they are still stuck, the next step is to contact someone who can help them.
Note the ethos here of helping people help themselves before they disturb the work of their colleagues.
Performance support is often consumed in a state of stress when someone is saying “HELP! I’m stuck”. It therefore needs to be fast, simple, and direct. Give it the ‘would a seven-year-old understand it?’ test. It needs to be easy to consume, which means you should think about presentation and even things like the font size and paragraph length. (Consider the Gunning Fog Index for readability.) Make sure you create the performance support in collaboration with the eventual end users, who are probably at different levels of experience and expertise, and will be accessing it from different scenarios and use cases.
The pyramid is an idealised situation to be sure, but the concept of providing only enough to meet someone’s immediate need, and then more only if they ask for it, is useful. Giving someone access to the full 200-page user manual, when all they have is a simple question, is not actually being helpful.
Then check out our e-Learning vs e-Reference guide and other useful downloads
