Is Your Product’s Documentation Good Enough?

In the real world, when we buy a phone, or a microwave or a washing machine, it comes with a quick start guide, a user guide, some technical documentation, and other similar stuff.

Without these documents, we'll have to learn how to use the product leveraging solely on the 'trial and error' method - which is not a pleasant user experience at all.

The same is true for the products and tools made from web developers.

In the last few years we have witnessed huge explosion in the web development world.

There are a vast variety of great projects out there. A deluge of plugins, libraries, frameworks, tools, and services have been created by smart people showing great insight and skill.

But there is one problem: many – perhaps most – lack of good documentation. No matter how great is a particular product might be, if it has poor documentation, we're unlikely to use it fully and properly.

The goal of this article is to address the importance of having a good documentation both for the web developers, and for the users.

I mainly target programming products such as code libraries, plugins, and so forth, but all said below can be easily adapted to any kind of product or service. The principles are the same.

Let's see them.

The Three Steps to the Great Success

In the web development world there are three steps leading to great success.

1. Creating great product. First and foremost, you need to have something useful and valuable to propose to the people out there. It can be a product or a service, but in either case it must be of great quality.

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