Making a manual

Make it look professional and business- like. After organizing the data, put it on writing. List the information needed in the Manual. Put all details as necessary. Make it logical, simple and easy-to-read. Let the staff read and check out the manual. We recommend that you get feedback from three to five staff. Even those who are not experts or knowledgeable of that field can give their response or feedback to the Manual. Since they do not have prior knowledge of that field of work, they can give feedback whether they understood the Manual.

After doing appropriate checks and revisions, publish the manual within the company. You can also distribute the Manual to partners, clients, shareholders and investors. After publishing the Manual, you might find errors on the data, grammar or sentence construction. Since startup businesses are still growing and expanding, you would need to update the Manual every now and then.

Make sure that the instruction manual is in a smooth flow and covers all and in-depth processes from start to finish. Organizing the information is important to avoid confusion amongst the readers and make it an easy read for them. Now that you have everything outlined and organized with a clear structure in mind, the next step would be to start writing!

Always keep in mind that the primary purpose of user manuals is to help users complete tasks and solve problems. Thus, giving clear, to-the-point instructions help your customers get up to speed with your product or solve their issues with it quickly.

Always using numbered lists for instructions and keeping the content concise are some great practices for writing a good manual. Adding a table of contents to your instruction manual is a must. If your instruction manual is heavy on pages, the importance of having a table of contents increases exponentially.

The table of content provides navigation to the reader and helps them go to a particular topic quickly. Since customers are not looking to read your manual from start to finish and are just looking to solve a particular problem or learn about a topic, adding a table of contents helps them save time and effort. Using a document editor that automatically creates a table of contents around headings and subheadings is a great way to go about it.

Instruction manuals are well, boring. They are filled with text and are not very engaging. On top of that, visuals are processed 60, times faster in the brain than text. Making your online manual interactive with how-to videos and audio instructions can be a great way to enhance engagement and help customers or clients effectively.

Keep on reading! Therefore, always ask employees, especially those who are unfamiliar with the product or have not worked with you in creating the instruction manual, to give their honest feedback and suggestions on how to make it more effective.

Steps Included. After learning about all the key points to include in your instruction manuals, we know you are itching to get on with the work of creating one.

This is why we would like to introduce you to Bit, the smartest document collaboration tool to create instruction manuals and other digital workplace documents for free! Bit is a new age cloud-based document collaboration tool that helps teams create, manage and track workplace documents including-.

Bit helps you make sure your instruction manuals are more than just plain boring text and images. Bit will automatically turn it into a live visual web link or embed content that lives on your workplace documents! Just copy-paste the URL of your content on a blank line of the document editor and hit enter. Bit then generates a live preview of your digital content within your document. Imagine how rich and interactive your instruction manuals can become!

Not sure how Bit can help you write the perfect instruction manual? Bit has a minimal document editor which allows you to write your instruction manual without the distraction of unnecessary buttons and tabs. Creating an instruction manual from scratch takes a lot of time and effort. Now, this is the long bit — the process of taking screenshot after screenshot to make sure you can thoroughly explain your product.

The ability to edit your screenshots to show specific details is important to you and the viewer. So, open Snagit, and get to it! With Snagit, there is a built-in editor for everything you need when making a user manual. You can add arrows, boxes, text, and more. One feature that I want to focus on is the simplify tool.

Simplified User Interfaces SUI are great to ignore all the unnecessary information, future-proof your content, and make your visuals appeal to all, no matter the language.

As you can see from the image on the right, your eyes immediately go to what is being showcased. After it has been simplified, the screenshot is much easier to understand and follow.

While screenshots are helpful by themselves, combining them with copy can provide a more detailed explanation than pictures alone. Maybe you want to highlight an alternative way of doing something or explain what certain features are.

The goal of your copy is to be detailed, but not too lengthy.