Have you ever read a software help file that tells you that the button with SAVE written on it does indeed save the current file?
User guides, particularly in the software arena, tend to suffer from this problem: they provide a viable description of what the features are, but little information as to why you might use each feature, or the consequences of taking certain actions.
They don’t give you enough information to decide between actions A, B or C.
Make sure your support resources help people make contextual decisions and support action.
The only way to do this is put yourself in their shoes and ask, “Why would I do X or Y?”.
And, bring in someone who has recently been through that learning curve to help write the support.
Get it approved by a subject-matter expert, but be wary of their approach because they are not a user; they don’t need the support themselves and what seems to be common sense to them is not necessarily so to anyone without their experience. They have usually forgotten what it is like to be a novice without their fluency of recall in the subject.
Look at your support resources.
Do they include context?
Do they include the ‘why’?
