Expanding on the post about how to write a business process, a key ingredient for any recipe, or process documentation, is adding visual or multimedia elements.
Instructions become clearer when the text is combined with a visual. Visuals and multimedia increase the accuracy and consistency of the process being performed and decrease the number of questions people will have about how to do the work.
Different people also prefer to learn in different formats, so text-based documentation is less likely to be as useful or as adopted as multimedia documentation. For example, my preferred learning format is reading or writing since I need to see the words on the page or screen in order to process and retain information. It's why I take a lot of notes when I have to watch a video or listen to a meeting, and it is one of the reasons I became interested in documentation. I realize not everyone is the same as me, so I use additional formats to make documentation useful for more people.
A video can be more useful for people who process information by seeing someone do the work or who prefer hearing someone explain how to do it. If the documentation contains more than one format to learn the information, it is more useful, so it is more likely to be adopted, which solves another common challenge.
I usually recommend starting your documentation with text since it doesn't require any special tools like video editing software. But if you're a verbal processing person who procrastinates writing, another great way to start is by recording yourself talking on audio or video, and then transcribing it. Just make sure that text does appear in the final documentation in some way. Text is easier, faster, and more accessible to edit compared to video or audio formats. If your main documentation challenge is convincing people to update it regularly, keep that in mind. You can see a few more reasons for creating text documentation in the previous blog.
The content of this blog is from my workshop and course on documentation.
Flowcharts or process mapping is often the next step after you’ve written out your step-by-step documentation, turning all the steps into a flowchart. This visual is often used for process improvement. Combining written instructions and a broad overview process map in one document, or linked together, can also be helpful for people to see how their individual tasks fit into the larger business process.
Sometimes a flowchart may be created before the detailed instructions if you need to see and agree on the larger picture of the overall process first.
Examples:
Equilibria shares examples from building a process map:
Stratechi shows several technical examples of process maps:
Read more about process mapping from Lucidchart.
This Illustrative process mapping technique is not included in the documentation course, though it is discussed and demonstrated in the HubSpot Academy RevOps bootcamp I co-created and co-teach.
Adding screenshots to documentation can be helpful when the process is completed inside of software. There are tools such as Guidde, Iorad, Tango, Scribe, or HubSpot's Guide Creator that can help record and tie together multiple screenshots into videos or gifs (which would fall into the video or gif section of this blog). Note that tools can capture what you’re clicking on and where, but they cannot capture the context behind WHY the process is done that way, the goals of the process, or what you’ve tried before – those will still need to be manual additions to your documentation.
Examples:
HubSpot knowledge base article showing screenshots
Teamwork knowledge base article showing screenshots
Videos are many people's preferred method of learning and understanding. Make it clear in your documentation if the video is simply a different format of the text, or if it is additional information not found in the text. Speaking from personal experience, it can be very annoying to watch a 5-minute video if it's the exact same information as 30 seconds of reading text. Annoying people, or making them feel you wasted their time, is not a good strategy for getting your team to want to use your documentation. Overall, video, such as a screen share walkthrough of the process, is a great addition to documentation.
If you can embed the video within your document instead of just linking to the video, this removes a step for the user, and they are not clicking off somewhere else and getting distracted from finishing reading the documentation.
Examples
Embedded video in a HubSpot knowledge base article
Videos are powerful additions to documentation, though be aware they can require more work for the documentation creators and maintenance teams:
A few other options for visuals to add into your documentation:
I recommend adding visuals as one of the last steps of creating documentation, before testing. The written-out text steps are often needed to decide which step would best be displayed or illustrated, and then decide on which type of visual to use.
I don’t recommend trying to write out steps and think about visuals at the exact same time. It takes a shift in your thinking, thinking about writing steps compared to thinking about illustrating/showing them. That switching back and forth from words to visuals can make your brain tired. Drafting one format, then adding the other format, can be less overwhelming.
Another way to make adding visuals less overwhelming is to add in-progress language as a first step.
Add notes to your documentation describing the visuals you want to add:
Example detailed note:
If that is too much information for your first draft, try one of these shorter note examples to get started:
This note-adding is a good in-between step as you work on creating these images.
That will ensure the visual collection/creation process does not create a roadblock or additional procrastination before publishing and sharing your document. Your team can start benefitting from the documentation, or testing it, while you improve it by creating and adding visuals. This strategy helps break up the sometimes overwhelming task of creating documentation into more manageable steps.