All

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.

Thaddeus Dieken is a technical writer with Accuray, and Jacob Moses interviewed him on a podcast about getting your first job as a technical writer. This post is a write-up of that interview.

We often talk about customer-facing knowledge bases, but what about your internal staff? You should treat them just like customers, and they too can benefit from an internal knowledge base.