I was reading a blog article about writing documentation, and I came across this quote:

The purpose of technical documentation is to take someone who has never seen your project, teach them to be an expert user of it, and support them once they become an expert.

While that's a great definition, I think there needs to be a distinction between technical documentation and what you're trying to accomplish writing Salesforce documentation for your end users. 

Even though you documented everything with pictures, annotations, and clear text, a common situation you will find is that end users don't reference your documentation.

All of that time invested in creating a knowledge base, yet you continue to waste time fielding the same questions about how to do something in Salesforce (or you get crummy results because folks aren't following directions).

One reason might be that your articles are too long, making it difficult to find relevant information or see important details. To solve this problem, I recommend breaking up long articles that cover a few topics and/or tasks, into mini articles that each answer one specific question.

The hardest part about creating Salesforce documentation is writing those first few articles. So for those of you who want to use ScreenSteps to create your documentation, I went ahead and created a documentation website with over 150 articles to jump-start your documentation efforts. You can import the entire site into ScreenSteps and customize everything to reflect how your organization uses Salesforce.

If you don't want to use ScreenSteps to create Salesforce documentation, that's fine too - you can still checkout the documentation website and use it as a template to create your own internal wiki.

Some online knowledge base software (e.g. wikis) assume end-users know the questions they want to ask, so the software is optimized for search. The problem is, this approach leaves out end-users who don't know what question to search with, or what the options are.

When your end-users have a question about what to do in Salesforce, they want an answer right away. If that question is about an overall workflow, then a video might be nice. If the question is about how to fill out an invoice, then screenshots with arrows pointing them through steps would be great. If the question is, "What goes in the Parent Account?" field-level help is the way to go.

Helpful Salesforce documentation consists of showing end-users each step of a process using screenshots. Today I’m going to show you how to do it using Snagit.

You know it's a lot of information, but you go ahead and click "send" anyway, even though the majority of the recipients probably won't read it. You wish they would, but you know they won't.

It's not that the information is unimportant — it is very important! But most readers have a hard time getting through the information because the email is disorganized and poorly formatted.

So today, I want to share 3 tips for formatting and organizing email that has a lot of information:

Making a training video for your Salesforce end-users can help with onboarding new users, showing off new features, or demonstrating the benefits of Salesforce. But before you hit "record," I have a few tips that will help you streamline the process:

I came across a great presentation by Phil Nottingham from a conference called MozCon. Phil discussed some of the flaws behind the current strategy for using video as content, and I thought his advice was applicable to anyone who is creating content for teaching purposes - e.g. Salesforce Admins or consultants who are in charge of training.

Why do we make video?

Sometimes, we just want to create a video because video is impressive. So we approach the video creation process by saying, “I want to make a training video… what should I make it about?” 

When you hire new employees (or your existing employees change roles), getting them up and running can be a headache - which is why I recommend creating a quick onboarding guide that you and your users can reference.