Where did we leave off? Oh yeah. You’ve written a how-to for the dispatcher to assign field people to catch the cat. How do you make sure the dispatcher sees it?
Headings.
Remember the piece where I talked about writing fiction, and sometimes you have to plan ahead of the thing you are documenting, so you can create the framework? You draw up an outline. That’s your headings.
This is where the ART of writing comes in. Your content can be grouped in several ways: by persona, by experience level, by type of action, by software dialog, even alphabetically by title (don’t do that unless you hate your audience). This is where a style guide for your company will help. Your style guide should have a pointer for how to organize your content, or even a template. If you are spinning in the wind, start with workflow.
How to Assign a Field Operative
Caught your eye, didn’t it? However, it’s the same size as the title of this piece. Does it have the same importance?
You can change heading levels
To match the importance of the content
And help it all hook together
For example, let’s say the workflow for the dispatcher looks something like this:
Answer the phone
Take the information from the caller and enter it into the system
Assess importance of attendance (send now vs send later)
Assign field operative
(I’m a technical writer. I think in lists. Because these happen in order, they’re numbered.)
So, each of those could be a chunk of content with their own instructions. And those sets of instructions would have a heading to help group them together. The outline in headings could look something like this:
Typical Dispatch Workflow
Answer the phone
Take the information from the caller and enter it into the system
Assess importance of attendance (send now vs send later)
Assign field operative
That’s what I’d consider a high-level structure rough draft. The overall header is descriptive but maybe not within the company’s desired tone. The second smaller heading includes an “and”, which is a red flag when it comes to instructions—it could be more than one set of instructions there, and will need to be assessed as they are fleshed out. The third content title has a phrase in parenthesis—while clarifying, is it in the company’s voice, or is it just the writer taking notes to help them remember what “assess importance of attendance” means? (Spoiler Alert: It’s the latter. I know my own style of notetaking.)
And your user, the new dispatch person? Can look at this in a table of contents or page of a help system and see immediately which section they need to jump to for what part of the process.
However. We left our dispatcher needing to change tiger to liger. And that workflow doesn’t cover editing. So let’s add it.
Typical Dispatch Workflow
Answer the phone
Take the information from the caller and enter it into the system
Assess importance of attendance (send now vs send later)
Assign field operative
Editing caller information
Doesn’t fit there, does it? We would hope it is not part of the typical workflow. Let’s try again.
Typical Dispatch Workflow
Answer the phone
Take the information from the caller and enter it into the system
Assess importance of attendance (send now vs send later)
Assign field operative
Editing caller information
The information is in the same place in the structure, but by changing the size of the heading to the same as the overall heading for the typical workflow, it’s no longer part of that workflow. Ta da! And still a rough draft. The new heading isn’t parallel in overall structure to ANY of the others, especially the one on the same level. And I question whether it should have the same importance as the typical workflow. But we’ll work on that another time. For now, we have the Happy workflow where everything goes well, and one way to fix one of the possible problems our dispatch user may encounter.
Okay. I can’t leave the structure like that for this imaginary product and person. Here’s what I’d do.
Typical Dispatch Workflow
Answer the phone
Take the information from the caller and enter it into the system
Assess importance of attendance (send now vs send later)
Assign field operative
Troubleshooting
Edit caller information
(Include link to this from taking information)
Other troubleshooting tasks
(acts as a reminder to finish thinking about the rainy day options and add them)
Okay now I’m done for today.
Great post! Clear, logical outlines result in clear, logical instructions.