User guides
User guides A user guide is task-based documentation. A user guide is document that explains how to use software to do procedures. A user guide answers the question, "How do I…?"
A user guide can contain operating instructions, maintenance instructions, technical descriptions, flow charts, drawings, and diagrams.
Sometimes, a user guide has full information about all the tasks that users do. Sometimes, a user guide has information only about the most frequent tasks or the most important tasks that users do.
Usually, a good combination of documentation is a user guide that contains only basic information, and online documentation that has full help about a product. This combination of documents has these benefits:
Users have all the necessary information.
The user guide is comparatively small.