Catherine Heath, KnowledgeOwl Blog Contributor

Whether you’re a seasoned technical writer, or someone who is new to writing documentation, following a process might make starting new documentation projects easier.

Technical writers can learn a lot from marketers by paying attention to the field of psychology, and ensure that users are likely to be successful using their documentation.

Using the principles of psychology is an important part of designing your knowledge base Information Architecture. Your knowledge of these principles has implications for the conceptual layout of your knowledge base and overall documentation design.

Knowledge base templates are a handy way to be more productive and consistent with your documentation. The type of template you need depends on what you want to use your templates to achieve.

Minimalism in general means focusing only on what you actually want or need, and eliminating the rest. It’s based on the idea that less is more, and you can apply it to your documentation.

In structured content, content is treated as data to be stored, managed, and reused. Structured content for documentation is managed by technical authors using specialized software tools, and can be governed by information standards.