Idiot Savant

For the past two days I have been writing documentation for some new features I'll be adding to the corporate intranet. Writing technical documentation for your own software is not only a tedious chore, it involves a sort of mental gymnastics that is apt to end in headaches. As the author of the code, you know the code inside out and trying to walk though all the functionality from the perspective of someone who has never seen it before isn't easy, especially when the application is contained by a middleware platform and a lot of the functionality is really the stock functionality of the platform. Think of it this way, if you were writing the manual for Notepad in Windows, would you mention that CTRL-C and CTRL-V can be used to cut and paste text, respectively? That funtionality is not part of Notepad per se, it is standard Windows funtionality. But what if the user isn't likely to know that? Every little bit of functionality I have to think about all the users in the company, what they have been used to, and try and make a guess about how much knowledge to presume. Then I have to balance that against laziness because, as a general rule, the only ones who ever really read the documentation are those who need it least. Lots of screen grabs (which are tedious to create: capture, crop, circle, capture, crop, circle, ad nauseam) and simple language are required. So it entails bopping back and forth between thinking like a twit and then coming up with a compelling way to explain what is obvious to me to said hypothetical twit.

It makes my brain hurt.