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Who’s using Diátaxis? ¶ At Gatsby we recently reorganized our open-source documentation, and the Diátaxis framework was our go-to resource throughout the project. The four quadrants helped us prioritize the user’s goal for each type of documentation. By restructuring our documentation around the Diátaxis framework, we made it easier for users to discover the resources that they need when they need them. —Megan Sullivan ( @meganesulli ) Not listed here? If you’re using the system, or are in the process of adopting it, please let me know if you’d like to be listed here. The best way is to submit a pull request via GitHub\. This is an incomplete list of projects, products and organisations that have adopted the system in their own bodies of documentation. In some cases the adoption remains partial or is still a work in progress. Aiven Developer, developer documentation for managed open source data platforms BBC News Labs, e.g. for mosromgr, a Python library for managing TV and radio running orders BrachioGraph, the cheapest, simplest pen-plotter BeeWare, the write-once-deploy-anywhere project, for Toga, Briefcase, Rubicon and Rubicon Java\. Bosch (internal) Canonical - all of Canonical’s product documentation is adopting (or will adopt) Diátaxis Ciw, the discrete event simulation library clj-otel, Clojure API for OpenTelemetry Cloudflare Workers docs (related article, New and improved Workers Docs ) corrux (internal) Divio Django django CMS edo, a library for Evolutionary Dataset Optimisation Encore, a framework for rapid backend development Ericsson (internal) fpm, the Fortran Package Manager Google’s Fuchsia operating system Funding Circle (internal) Gatsby Gensim, How to Author Gensim Documentation Gorgonia, a deep learning library for Go gtk-fortran, the Fortran bindings for GTK ING Bank, for open-source (e.g. doing-cli, Probatus, skorecard ) and internal tooling projects Lisk Livepeer LootLocker, a backend for independent games development Matching, a games theory resource allocation library NashPy, a Python mathematical library for computing Nash equilibria nbchkr, a system for assessing students’ assignments in Jupyter Notebooks NumPy, the scientific Python library (related article, Documentation as a way to build Community ) PDFminer.six PostgREST PowerTuning (internal) PIconnect Snowpack, a frontend build tool, designed for the modern web Sourcegraph, Universal code search Splink, a Python library for probabilistic data linkage stdlib, the Fortran Standard library StrongLoop/LoopBack by IBM TerminusDB Tesla Motors (internal) WebAccess/DMP websockets Wechaty : A Conversational RPA SDK for Chatbot Makers Zalando (internal) Other mentions and references of interest ¶ Django Axes proposal GitLab, GitLab’s Data Team documentation guide Julia language proposal Why You Should Document Your Work As a Data Scientist Koninglijke Biblioteek (National Library of the Netherlands) research software lab Tutorials in Jenkins user documentation TYPO3

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Colofon ¶ Diátaxis is the work of Daniele Procida. The principles described in this website have been developed over a number of years, and continue to be elaborated and explored. Origins and development ¶ The original context for this approach was software product documentation, which remains their principal application. More recent work has seen them applied at scale in internal corporate documentation, in scientific research contexts, organisational management and education. Divio and Diátaxis ¶ The key concepts behind Diátaxis first crystallised while working at Divio, the cloud applications platform. I presented these ideas at conferences in early 2017, and as they gained a fuller form, wrote them up as The documentation system for Divio. The thinking and approaches I elaborated while working at Divio are at the core of the Diátaxis documentation philosophy. I remain grateful to Divio for the long and fruitful collaboration that provided me with the opportunity to develop and express these ideas. Divio should be acknowledged as having helped nurture them. Since leaving Divio in 2021 I have continued to research and refine my approaches and methods in documentation, now published here. For the sake of clarity, the material published at https://documentation.divio.com/ is Divio’s intellectual property and is rightfully there\. Divio has behaved with appropriate courtesy and propriety throughout my time working at the company, and since then. Do not approach or hassle Divio demanding explanations. Contact the author ¶ Email Daniele Procida\. I read everything I receive. I appreciate all the interest and do my best to reply, but I get a considerable quantity of email related to Diátaxis and I can’t promise to respond to every message. If you’d like to discuss Diátaxis with other users, please see the #diataxis channel on the Write the Docs Slack group, or the Discussions section of the GitHub repository\. You can also submit a pull request to have your documentation listed in Who’s using Diátaxis or to suggest an improvement, or file an issue\. How to cite Diátaxis ¶ To cite Diátaxis, please refer to this website, diataxis.fr\. The Git repository for the source material contains a citation file, CITATION.cff\. APA and BibTeX metadata are available from the Cite this repository option at https://github.com/evildmp/diataxis-documentation-framework\. Website ¶ This website is built with Sphinx and hosted on Read the Docs, using a modified version of the Furo theme by Pradyun Gedam\.

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The compass ¶ The Diátaxis map is an effective reminder of the different kinds of documentation and their relationship, and it accords well with intuitions about documentation. However intuition is not always to be relied upon. Often when working with documentation, an author is faced with the question: what form of documentation is this? or what form of documentation is needed here? - and no obvious, intuitive answer. Worse, sometimes intuition provides an immediate answer that is also wrong. A map is most powerful in unfamiliar territory when we also have a compass to guide us. The Diátaxis compass is something like a truth-table or decision-tree of documentation. It reduces a more complex, two-dimensional problem to its simpler parts, and provides the author with a course-correction tool. If the content describes… …and serves the user’s… …then it must belong to… practical steps study a tutorial practical steps work a how-to guide theoretical knowledge work reference theoretical knowledge study explanation The compass can be applied equally to user situations that need documentation, or to documentation itself that perhaps needs to be moved or improved. To use the compass, two questions need to be asked: Are we dealing with practical steps (action, something someone will do ), or are we dealing with theoretical knowledge (propositional knowledge, information, something someone will only think )? and: Are we dealing with study (the acquisition of skills and knowledge) or work (the application of skills and knowledge)? Using the compass is itself something that becomes more effective and accurate with practice, but it quickly becomes a useful decision-making tool.

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Diátaxis in complex hierarchies ¶ The basics ¶ The application of Diátaxis to most documentation is fairly straightforward. The product that defines the domain of concern has clear boundaries, and it’s possible to come up with a simple arrangement of its contents according to the principles, for example: home <- landing page tutorial <- landing page part 1 part 2 part 3 how-to guides <- landing page install deploy scale reference <- landing page commandline tool available endpoints API explanation <- landing page best practice recommendations security overview performance In each case, a landing page contains an overview of the contents within. The tutorial for example describes what the tutorial has to offer, providing context for it. Adding a layer of hierarchy ¶ Even very large documentation sets can use this effectively, though after a while some grouping of pages withing sections might be wise. This can be done by adding another layer of hierarchy - for example to be able to address different installation options separately: home <- landing page tutorial part 1 part 2 part 3 how-to guides <- landing page install <- landing page locally Docker virtual machine Linux container deploy scale reference <- landing page commandline tool available endpoints API explanation <- landing page best practice recommendations security overview performance Once again, each level of the hierarchy in a section has an overview landing page, for orientation. The problem of lists ¶ Lists longer than a few items are very hard for humans to read, unless they have an inherent mechanical order - numerical, or alphabetical. Seven items seems to be a comfortable general limit. If you find that you’re looking at lists longer than that in your tables of contents, you need to find a way to break them up into small ones. Once again, what matters here most is not the integrity of whatever scheme you’re working with, but the experience of the reader\. Diátaxis works because it fits user needs well - if your execution of Diátaxis leads you to formats that seem uncomfortable or ugly, then you need to use it differently. Overviews and introductory text ¶ The content of a landing page itself should read like an overview. That is, it should not simply present lists of other content, it should introduce them. Remember that you are always authoring for a human user, not fulfilling the demands of a scheme. Headings and snippets of introductory text catch the eye and provide context; for example, a how-to landing page : How to guides ============= Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipiscing elit. Installation guides ------------------- Pellentesque malesuada, ipsum ac mollis pellentesque, risus nunc ornare odio, et imperdiet dui mi et dui. Phasellus vel porta turpis. In feugiat ultricies ipsum. * locally | * Docker | links to * Virtual machines | the guides * Linux containers | Deployment and scaling ----------------------- Morbi sed scelerisque ligula. In dictum lacus quis felis facilisis vulputate. Quisque lacinia condimentum ipsum laoreet tempus. * Deploy an instance | links to * Scale your application | the guides Two-dimensional problems ¶ A more difficult problem is when the structure outlined by Diátaxis meets another structure - often, a structure of topic areas within the documentation, or when documentation encounters very different user-types. For example we might have a product that is used on land, sea and air, and though the same product, is used quite differently in each case. And it could be that a user who uses it on land is very unlikely to use it at sea. Or, the product documentation addresses the needs of: users developers who build other products around it the contributors who help maintain it. The same product, but very different concerns. A final example: a product that can be deployed on different public clouds, with each public cloud presenting quite different workflows, commands, APIs, GUIs, constraints and so on. Even though it’s the same product, as far as the users in each case are concerned, what they need to know and do is very different - what they need is documentation not for product, but product-on-public-cloud-one product-on-public-cloud-two and so on… So, we could decide on an overall structure that does this: tutorial for users on land [...] for users at sea [...] for users in the air [...] [and then so on for how-to guides, reference and explanation] or maybe instead this: for users on land tutorial [...] how-to guides [...] reference [...] explanation [...] for users at sea [tutorial, how-to, reference, explanation sections] for users in the air [tutorial, how-to, reference, explanation sections] Which is better? There seems to be a lot of repetition in either cases. What about the material that can be shared between land, sea and air? What is the problem? ¶ Firstly, the problem is in no way limited to Diátaxis - there would be the difficulty of managing documentation in any case. However, Diátaxis certainly helps reveal the problem, as it does in many cases. It brings it into focus and demands that it be addressed. Secondly, the question highlights a common misunderstanding. Diátaxis is not a scheme into which documentation must be placed - four boxes. It posits four different kinds of documentation, around which documentation should be structured, but this does not mean that there must be simply four divisions of documentation in the hierarchy, one for each of those categories. Diátaxis as an approach ¶ Diátaxis can be neatly represented in a diagram - but it is not the same as that diagram. It should be understood as an approach, a way of working with documentation, that identifies four different needs and uses them to author and structure documentation effectively. This will tend towards a clear, explicit, structural division into the four categories - but that is a typical outcome of the good practice, not its end. User-first thinking ¶ Diátaxis is underpinned by attention to user needs, and once again it’s that concern that must direct us. What we must document is the product as it is for the user, the product as it is in their hands and minds. (Sadly for the creators of products, how they conceive them is much less relevant.) Is the product on land, sea and air effectively three different products, perhaps for three different users? In that case, let that be the starting point for thinking about it. If the documentation needs to meet the needs of users, developers and contributors, how do they see the product? Should we assume that a developer who incorporates it into other products will typically need a good understanding of how it’s used, and that a contributor needs to know what a developer knows too? Then perhaps it makes sense to be freer with the structure, in some parts (say, the tutorial) allowing the developer-facing content to follow on from the user-facing material, while completely separating the contributors’ how-to guides from both. And so on. If the structure is not the simple, uncomplicated structure we began with, that’s not a problem - as long as there is arrangement according to Diátaxis principles, that documentation does not muddle up its different forms and purposes. Let documentation be complex if necessary ¶ Documentation should be as complex as it needs to be, and it will sometimes have complex structures. But even complex structures can be made straightforward to navigate as long as they are logical and incorporate patterns that fit the needs of users.

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Colofon ¶ Diátaxis is the work of Daniele Procida. The principles described in this website have been developed over a number of years, and continue to be elaborated and explored. Origins and development ¶ The original context for this approach was software product documentation, which remains their principal application. More recent work has seen them applied at scale in internal corporate documentation, in scientific research contexts, organisational management and education. Divio and Diátaxis ¶ The key concepts behind Diátaxis first crystallised while working at Divio, the cloud applications platform. I presented these ideas at conferences in early 2017, and as they gained a fuller form, wrote them up as The documentation system for Divio. The thinking and approaches I elaborated while working at Divio are at the core of the Diátaxis documentation philosophy. I remain grateful to Divio for the long and fruitful collaboration that provided me with the opportunity to develop and express these ideas. Divio should be acknowledged as having helped nurture them. Since leaving Divio in 2021 I have continued to research and refine my approaches and methods in documentation, now published here. For the sake of clarity, the material published at https://documentation.divio.com/ is Divio’s intellectual property and is rightfully there\. Divio has behaved with appropriate courtesy and propriety throughout my time working at the company, and since then. Do not approach or hassle Divio demanding explanations. Contact the author ¶ Email Daniele Procida\. I read everything I receive. I appreciate all the interest and do my best to reply, but I get a considerable quantity of email related to Diátaxis and I can’t promise to respond to every message. If you’d like to discuss Diátaxis with other users, please see the #diataxis channel on the Write the Docs Slack group, or the Discussions section of the GitHub repository\. You can also submit a pull request to have your documentation listed in Who’s using Diátaxis or to suggest an improvement, or file an issue\. How to cite Diátaxis ¶ To cite Diátaxis, please refer to this website, diataxis.fr\. The Git repository for the source material contains a citation file, CITATION.cff\. APA and BibTeX metadata are available from the Cite this repository option at https://github.com/evildmp/diataxis-documentation-framework\. Website ¶ This website is built with Sphinx and hosted on Read the Docs, using a modified version of the Furo theme by Pradyun Gedam\.

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About explanation ¶ Explanation is discussion that clarifies and illuminates a particular topic. Explanation is understanding-oriented\. Explanation clarifies, deepens and broadens the reader’s understanding of a subject. It’s not concerned with what the user might be doing, like tutorials and how-to guides. It’s not a close-up view of the machinery, like reference material. It’s documentation that approaches a topic from a higher perspective, and from different angles. This allows explanation to become discussion, a more relaxed, freer way to consider something. Explanation joins things together. It’s documentation that it makes sense to read while away from the product itself. The value and place of explanation ¶ Explanation and understanding ¶ Explanation, unlike the other three forms of documentation, doesn’t have a direct part in a user’s practice or work. This means that it’s sometimes seen as being of lesser importance. That’s a mistake; it may be less urgent than the other three, but it’s no less important\. It’s not a luxury. No practitioner of a craft can afford to be without an understanding of that craft, and needs the explanatory material that will help weave it together. Explanation by any other name Your explanation documentation doesn’t need to be called Explanation\. Alternatives include: Discussion Background Conceptual guides Topics In most European languages, words that mean understanding share roots in words meaning to hold or grasp. That’s an important part of understanding, to be able to hold something or be in possession of it. It seals together the other components of our mastery of a craft, and makes it safely our own. Understanding doesn’t simply come from explanation, but explanation is required to form that web that helps hold everything together. Without it, the practitioner’s knowledge of their craft is loose and fragmented and fragile, and their exercise of it is anxious\. Explanation and its boundaries ¶ It’s fairly rare to see explanation given its own section in documentation, and the idea that things need to be explained is often only faintly expressed. Instead, explanation tends to be scattered in small parcels in other sections. It’s not always easy to write good explanatory material. Where does one start? It’s also not clear where to conclude. There is an open-endedness about it that can give the writer too many possibilities. Tutorials, how-to-guides and reference are all clearly defined in their scope by something that is also well-defined: by what you need the user to learn, what task the user needs to achieve, or just by the scope of the machine itself. In the case of explanation, it’s useful to have a real or imagined why question to serve as a prompt. Otherwise, you simply have to draw some lines that mark out a reasonable area and be satisfied with that. Analogy from cooking ¶ In 1984 Harold McGee published On food and cooking\. The book doesn’t teach how to cook anything. It doesn’t contain recipes (except as historical examples) and it isn’t a work of reference. Instead, it places food and cooking in the context of history, society, science and technology. It explains for example why we do what we do in the kitchen and how that has changed. It considers its subject from multiple different perspectives, using them to illuminate it in different ways. After reading a book like On food and cooking, our understanding is changed. Our knowledge is richer and deeper. We may not have learned anything that we can apply in practice, or that will change what we do, but it will change how we think about our craft, and that is just as valuable. It’s something we might read at our leisure, away from the kitchen itself, when we want to think about cooking at a higher level, and to understand more about the subject. Writing good explanation ¶ Make connections ¶ When writing explanation you are helping to weave a web of understanding for your readers. Make connections to other things, even to things outside the immediate topic, if that helps. Provide context ¶ Provide background and context in your explanation : explain why things are so - design decisions, historical reasons, technical constraints - draw implications, mention specific examples. Talk about the subject ¶ Things to discuss the bigger picture history choices, alternatives, possibilities why: reasons and justifications Explanation guides are about a topic in the sense that they are around it. Even the names of your explanation guides should reflect this; you should be able to place an implicit (or even explicit) about in front of each title. For example: About user authentication, or About database connection policies\. Discuss alternatives and opinions ¶ Explanation can consider alternatives, counter-examples or multiple different approaches to the same question. You’re not giving instruction or describing facts - you’re opening up the topic for consideration. It helps to think of explanation as discussion: discussions can even consider and weigh up contrary opinions\. Don’t instruct, or provide technical reference ¶ One risk of explanation is that other things can tend to creep in. Explanation should do things that the other parts of the documentation do not. It’s not the place of an explanation to instruct the user in how to do something. Nor should it provide technical description. These functions of documentation are already taken care of in other sections. The language of explanation ¶ The reason for x is because historically, y… Explain. W is better than z, because… Offer judgements and even opinions where appropriate.. An x in system y is analogous to a w in system z. However… Provide context that helps the reader. Some users prefer w (because z). This can be a good approach, but… Weigh up alternatives. An x interacts with a y as follows:… Unfold the machinery’s internal secrets, to help understand why something does what it does.

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About how-to guides ¶ How-to guides are directions that take the reader through the steps required to solve a real-world problem. How-to guides are goal-oriented\. How-to guides can be thought of as recipes, directions that guide the reader through the steps to achieve a specific end. Examples could be: how to calibrate the radar array; how to use fixtures in pytest; how to configure reconnection back-off policies\. On the other hand, how to build a web application is not - that’s not addressing a specific goal or problem, it’s a vastly open-ended sphere of skill. How-to guides matter not just because users need to be able to accomplish things: the list of how-to guides in your documentation helps frame the picture of what your product can actually do\. A rich list of how-to guides is an encouraging suggestion of a product’s capabilities. If they’re well-written and address the right subjects, you’re likely to find that how-to guides are the most-read sections of your documentation. Tutorials vs how-to guides ¶ How-to guides are wholly distinct from tutorials\. They are easily conflated, as both describe a series of practical steps that lead to the completion of some task. The user-needs that they serve are quite different however, and conflating them is at the root of many difficulties that afflict documentation. See What’s the difference between a tutorial and how-to guide? for an extended discussion of this distinction. Food and cooking ¶ Consider a recipe, an excellent model for a how-to guide. A recipe clearly defines what will be achieved by following it, and addresses a specific question ( How do I make…? or What can I make with…? ). It’s not the responsibility of a recipe to teach you how to make something. A professional chef who has made exactly the same thing multiple times before may still follow a recipe - even if they created the recipe themselves - to ensure that they do it correctly. Even following a recipe requires at least basic competence\. Someone who has never cooked before should not be expected to follow a recipe with success, so a recipe is not a substitute for a cooking lesson. Someone who expected to be provided with a recipe, and is given instead a cooking lesson, will be disappointed and annoyed. Similarly, while it’s interesting to read about the context or history of a particular dish, the one time you don’t want to be faced with that is while you are in the middle of trying to make it. A good recipe follows a well-established format, that excludes both teaching and discussion, and focuses only on how to make the dish concerned. Writing a good how-to guide ¶ Describe a sequence of actions ¶ Like a tutorial, a how-to guide contains a sequence of actions, that have an order\. Unlike a tutorial, you don’t have to start at the beginning of the whole story and take your reader right to the end. Most likely, your user will also be in the middle of something - so you only need to provide a starting-point that they know how to reach, and a conclusion that actually answers a real question. How-to characteristics focused on tasks or problems assume the user knows what they want to achieve action and only action no digression, explanation, teaching How-to guides should be reliable, but they don’t need to have the cast-iron repeatability of a tutorial. Solve a problem ¶ The problem or task is the concern of a how-to guide: stick to that practical goal\. Anything else that’s added - unnecessary explanation, for example - distracts both you and the user and dilutes the useful power of the guide. Don’t explain concepts ¶ An explanation doesn’t show you how to do something - so a how-to guide should not try to explain things. Explanation here will simply get in the way of the action. If explanations are important, link to them. Be flexible ¶ A tutorial needs to be didactic in nature, but a how-to guide needs to be adaptable to real-world use-cases\. A how-to guide that is useless for any purpose except exactly the narrow one you have addressed is rarely valuable. Omit the unnecessary ¶ In how-to guides, practical usability is more helpful than completeness. Whereas a tutorial needs to be a complete, end-to-end guide, a how-to guide does not. It should start and end in some reasonable, meaningful place, and require the reader to join it up to their own work. Pay attention to naming ¶ Choose titles that say exactly what a how-to guide shows. good: How to integrate application performance monitoring bad: Integrating application performance monitoring (maybe the document is about how to decide whether you should, not about how to do it) very bad: Application performance monitoring (maybe it’s about how - but maybe it’s about whether, or even just an explanation of what it is) Note that search engines appreciate good titles just as much as humans do. The language of how-to guides ¶ This guide shows you how to… Describe clearly the problem or task that the guide shows the user how to solve. If you want x, do y. To achieve w, do z. Use conditional imperatives. Refer to the x reference guide for a full list of options. Don’t pollute your practical how-to guide with every possible thing the user might do related to x.

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How to use Diátaxis ¶ In short, the answer is: pragmatically\. Diátaxis is based on sound theoretical principles and has been proven in practice, but it’s not the final word in documentation. The only value that it can offer you is to be useful in helping make your documentation better for its users, and easier for you to create and maintain. The best thing you can do with it therefore is take from it however much seems to work for you: as much or as little as you wish. Use Diátaxis as a guide, not a plan ¶ Diátaxis describes a complete picture of documentation. However the structure it proposes is not intended to be a plan, something you must complete in your documentation. It’s a guide, a map to help you check that you’re in the right place and going in the right directions. The point of Diátaxis is to give you a way to think about and understand your documentation, so that you can make better sense of what it’s doing and what you’re trying to do with it. It provides tools that help assess it, identify where its problems lie, and judge what you can do to improve it. Don’t worry about structure ¶ Although structure is key to documentation, using Diátaxis means not spending energy trying to get its structure correct\. If you continue to follow the prompts that Diátaxis provides, eventually your documentation will assume the Diátaxis structure - but it will have assumed that shape because it has been improved. It’s not the other way round, that the structure must be imposed upon documentation to improve it. In practice, this means that getting started with Diátaxis doesn’t require thinking about dividing up your documentation into the four sections, or writing out headings to put material under. Instead, following the workflow described in the next two sections, make changes where you see opportunities for improvement according to Diátaxis principles, so that the documentation starts to take a certain shape. At a certain point, the changes you have made will appear to demand that you move material under a certain Diátaxis heading - and that is how your top-level structure will form. In other words, Diátaxis changes the structure of your documentation from the inside\. Work one step at a time ¶ Diátaxis strongly prescribes a structure, but whatever the state of your existing documentation - even if it’s a complete mess by any standards - it’s always possible to improve it, iteratively\. It’s natural to want to complete large tranches of work before you publish them, so that you have something substantial to show each time. Avoid this temptation - every step in the right direction is worth publishing immediately. Although Diátaxis is intended to provide a big picture of documentation, don’t try to work on the big picture\. It’s both unnecessary and unhelpful. Diátaxis is designed to guide small steps; keep taking small steps to arrive where you want to go. Just do something ¶ If you’re tidying up a huge mess, the temptation is to tear it all down and start again. Again, avoid it. As far as improving documentation in-line with Diátaxis goes, it isn’t necessary to seek out things to improve. Instead, the best way to apply Diátaxis is as follows: Choose something - any piece of the documentation. If you don’t already have something that you know you want to put right, don’t go looking for outstanding problems. Just look at what you have right in front of you at that moment: the file you’re in, the last page you read - it doesn’t matter. If there isn’t one just choose something, literally at random. Assess it\. Next consider this thing critically. Preferably it’s a small thing, nothing bigger than a page - or better, even smaller, a paragraph or a sentence. Challenge it, according to the standards Diátaxis prescribes: What user need is represented by this? How well does it serve that need? What can be added, moved, removed or changed to serve that need better? Do its language and logic meet the requirements of this mode of documentation? Decide what to do\. Decide, based on your answers to those questions: What single next action will produce an immediate improvement here? Do it\. Complete that next single action, and consider it completed - i.e. publish it, or at least commit the change. Don’t feel that you need to do anything else to make a worthy improvement. And then go back to the beginning of the cycle. Working like this helps reduce the stress of one of the most paralysing and troublesome aspects of the documentation-writer’s work: working out what to do. It keeps work flowing in the right direction, always towards the desired end, without having to expend energies on a plan. Allow your work to develop organically ¶ There’s a strong urge to work in a cycle of planning and execution in order to work towards results. But it’s not the only way, and there are often better ways when working with documentation. Well-formed organic growth ¶ A good model for documentation is well-formed organic growth that adapts to external conditions\. Organic growth takes place at the cellular level. The structure of the organism as a whole is guaranteed by the healthy development of cells, according to rules that are appropriate to each kind of cell. It’s not the other way round, that a structure is imposed on the organism from above or outside. Good structure develops from within. Illustration copyright Linette Voller 2021, reproduced with kind permission. ¶ It’s the same with documentation: by following the principles that Diátaxis provides, your documentation will attain a healthy structure, because its internal components themselves are well-formed - like a living organism, it will have built itself up from the inside-out, one cell at a time. Complete, not finished ¶ Consider a plant. As a living, growing organism, a plant is never finished - it can always develop further, move on to the next stage of growth and maturity. But, at every stage of its development, from seed to a fully-mature tree, it’s always complete - there’s never something missing from it. At any point, it is in a state that is appropriate to its stage of development. Similarly, documentation is also never finished, because it always has to keep adapting and changing to the product and to users’ needs, and can always be developed and improved further. However it can always be complete: useful to users, appropriate to its current stage of development, and in a healthy structural state and ready to go on to the next stage.

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The map of needs ¶ How to organise my documentation? In the absence of a clear, generalised documentation architecture, documentation creators will usually try to structure their work around characteristics or features of the product its intended to serve. This is rarely successful, even in a single instance. In a portfolio of documentation instances, the results are wild inconsistency. Much better is the adoption of a scheme that tries to provide an answer to the question: how to arrange documentation in general? In fact any orderly attempt to organise documentation into clear content categories will help improve it (for authors as well as users), by providing lists of content types. Even so, authors often find themselves needing to write particular documentation content that fails to fit well within the categories put forward by a scheme, or struggling to rewrite existing material. Often, there is a sense of arbitrariness about the structure that they find themselves working with - why this particular list of content types rather than another? And if another competing list is proposed, which to adopt? The Diátaxis map ¶ The most immediately striking feature of Diátaxis is its map: It’s a memorable and approachable idea. One reason it is effective as a guide to organising documentation is that it describes a two-dimensional structure, rather than a list\. It specifies its types of documentation in such a way that the structure naturally helps guide and shape the material it contains. As a map, it places the different forms of documentation into relationship with each other. Each one occupies a space in the mental territory it outlines, and the boundaries between them highlight their distinctions. The result is documentation that is not only better, but takes less effort to create and maintain - but that is only possible because the Diátaxis map is a map of needs\. Needs ¶ A map is only useful if it adequately describes a reality. Diátaxis is underpinned by a systematic description and analysis of generalised user needs\. The user whose needs Diátaxis serves is the practitioner in a domain of skill\. A domain of skill is defined by a craft - the use of a tool or product is a craft. So is an entire discipline or profession. Using a programming language is a craft, as is flying a particular aircraft, or even being a pilot in general. The successful engagement in any such craft or skill involves both theoretical grasp (knowledge and understanding), and an ability to apply that in practice, to work with the tools and materials of the craft. Documentation serving the practitioner must therefore meet the needs both of theory and its practical application\. And at any moment in their craft, a practitioner is either acquiring their skill, or applying it to actual work. That is, a practitioner is either in the mode of study (learning, acquiring, building up their skill) or the mode of work (applying, using, exercising it). And this gives documentation two more needs to meet. Axes of knowledge ¶ Diátaxis uses this analysis to divide documentation across two axes of knowledge: theory/practice, and acquisition/application\. Documentation therefore either contains theoretical (i.e. propositional) knowledge or describes practical actions, and is concerned either with serving our acquisition or our application of knowledge. Hence the map, across which the four forms of documentation are laid out. Characteristics of documentation ¶ A clear advantage of organising material this way is that it provides both clear expectations (to the reader) and guidance (to the author). It’s clear what the purpose of any particular piece of content is, it specifies how it should be written and it shows where it should be placed. Tutorials How-to guides Reference Explanation what they do introduce, educate, lead guide, demonstrate state, describe, inform explain, clarify, discuss answers the question “Can you teach me to…?” “How do I…?” “What is…?” “Why…?” oriented to learning tasks information understanding purpose to allow the newcomer to get started to show how to solve a specific problem to describe the machinery to explain form a lesson a series of steps dry description discursive explanation analogy teaching a child how to cook a recipe in a cookery book a reference encyclopaedia article an article on culinary social history Each piece of content is of a kind that not only has one particular job to do, that job is also clearly distinguished from and contrasted with the other functions of documentation. Collapse of the structure ¶ Most documentation systems and authors recognise at least some of these distinctions and try to observe them in practice. However, there is a kind of natural affinity between each of the different forms of documentation and its neighbours on the map, and a natural tendency to blur the distinctions (that can be seen repeatedly in examples of documentation). tutorials and how-to guides both describe practical steps how-to guides and technical reference are both concerned with the application of knowledge reference and explanation both contain theoretical knowledge tutorials and explanation are both concerned with the acquisition of knowledge Allowing these distinctions to blur is what brings about structural problems. The most common is a complete or partial collapse of tutorials and how-to guides into each other, while explanation spills over into both tutorials and reference material. The cycle of interaction ¶ Diátaxis is intended to help documentation better serve users in their cycle of interaction with a product. This phrase should not be understood too literally. It is not the case that a user must encounter the different kinds of documentation in the order tutorials > how-to guides > technical reference > explanation\. In practice, an actual user may enter the documentation anywhere in search of guidance on some particular subject, and what they want to read will change from moment to moment as they use your documentation. However, the idea of a cycle of documentation needs, that proceeds through different phases, is sound and corresponds to the way that people actually do become expert in a craft. There is a sense and meaning to this ordering. learning-oriented phase : We begin by learning, and learning a skill means diving straight in to do it - under the guidance of a teacher, if we’re lucky. task-oriented phase : Next we want to put the skill to work. information-oriented phase : As soon as our work calls upon knowledge that we don’t already have in our head, it requires us to consult technical reference. explanation-oriented phase : Finally, away from the work, we reflect on our practice and knowledge to understand the whole. And then it’s back to the beginning, perhaps for a new thing to grasp, or to penetrate deeper.

needs.txt

Towards a theory of quality in documentation ¶ Diátaxis is an approach to quality in documentation. “Quality” is a word in danger of losing some of its meaning; it’s something we all approve of, but rarely risk trying to describe in any rigorous way. We want quality in our documentation, but much less often specify what exactly what we mean by that. All the same, we can generally point to examples of “high quality documentation” when asked, and can identify lapses in quality when we see them - and more than that, we often agree when we do. This suggests that we still have a useful grasp on the notion of quality. As we pursue quality in documentation, it helps to make that grasp surer, by paying some attention to it - here, attempting to refine our grasp by positing a distinction between functional quality and deep quality\. Functional quality ¶ We need documentation to meet standards of accuracy, completeness, consistency, usefulness, precision and so on. We can call these aspects of its functional quality\. Documentation that fails to meet any one of them is failing to perform one of its key functions. These properties of functional quality are all independent of each other. Documentation can be accurate without being complete. It can be complete, but inaccurate and inconsistent. It can be accurate, complete, consistent and also useless. Attaining functional quality means meeting high, objectively-measurable standards in multiple independent dimensions, consistently. It requires discipline and attention to detail, and high levels of technical skill. To make it harder for the creator of documentation, any failure to meet all of these standards is readily apparent to the user. Deep quality ¶ There are other characteristics, that we can call deep quality\. Functional quality is not enough, or even satisfactory on its own as an ambition. True excellence in documentation implies characteristics of quality that are not included in accuracy, completeness and so on. Think of characteristics such as: feeling good to use having flow fitting to human needs being beautiful anticipating the user Unlike the characteristics of functional quality, they cannot be checked or measured, but they can still be clearly identified. When we encounter them, we usually (not always, because we need to be capable of it) recognise them. They are characteristics of deep quality\. What’s the difference? ¶ Aspects of deep quality seem to be genuinely distinct in kind from the characteristics of functional quality. Documentation can meet all the demands of functional quality, and still fail to exhibit deep quality. There are many examples of documentation that is accurate and consistent (and even very useful) but which is also awkward and unpleasant to use. It’s also noticeable that while characteristics of functional quality such as completeness and accuracy are independent of each other, those of deep quality are hard to disentangle. Having flow and anticipating the user are aspects of each other - they are interdependent\. It’s hard to see how something could feel good to use without fitting to our needs. Aspects of functional quality can be measured - literally, with numbers, in some cases (consider completeness). That’s clearly not possible with qualities such as having flow\. Instead, such qualities can only be enquired into, interrogated. Instead of taking measurements, we must make judgements\. Functional quality is objective - it belongs to the world. Accuracy of documentation means the extent to which it conforms to the world it’s trying to describe. Deep quality can’t be ascertained by holding something up to the world. It’s subjective, which means that we can assess it only in the light of the needs of the subject of experience, the human. And, deep quality is conditional upon functional quality. Documentation can be accurate and complete and consistent without being truly excellent - but it will never have deep quality without being accurate and complete and consistent. No user of documentation will experience it as beautiful, if it’s inaccurate, or enjoy the way it anticipates their needs if it’s inconsistent. The moment we run into such lapses the experience of documentation is tarnished. Finally, all of the characteristics of functional quality appear to us, as documentation creators, as burdens and constraints\. Each one of them represents a test or challenge we might fail. Or, even if we have met one now, we can never rest, because the next release or update means that we’ll have to check our work once again, against the thing that it’s documenting. Characteristics such as anticipating needs or flow, on the other hand, represent liberation, the work of creativity or taste. To attain functional quality in our work, we must conform to constraints; to attain deep quality we must invent\. Functional quality Deep quality independent characteristics independent characteristics objective subjective measured against the world assessed against the human a condition of deep quality conditional upon functional quality aspects of constraint aspects of liberation How we recognise deep quality ¶ Consider how we judge the quality of say, clothing. Clothes must have functional quality (they must keep us appropriately warm and dry, stand up to wear). These things are objectively measurable. You don’t really need to know much about clothes to assess how well they do those this. If water gets in, or the clothing falls apart - it lacks quality. There are other characteristics of quality in clothing that can’t simply be measured objectively, and to recognise those characteristics, we need to have an understanding of clothing. The quality of materials or workmanship isn’t always immediately obvious. Being able to judge that an item of clothing hangs well, moves well or has been expertly shaped requires developing at least a basic eye for those things. And these are its characteristics of deep quality\. But: even someone who can’t recognise, or fails to understand, those characteristics - who cannot say what they are - can still recognise very well that the clothing is excellent, because they find it that it feels good to wear, because it’s such that they want to wear it. No expertise is required to realise that clothing does or doesn’t feel comfortable as you move in it, that it fits and moves with you well. Your body knows it\. And it’s the same in documentation. Perhaps you need to be a connoisseur to recognise what it is that makes some documentation excellent, but that’s not necessary to be able to realise that it is excellent. Good documentation feels good; you feel pleasure and satisfaction when you use it - it feels like it fits and moves with you. The users of our documentation may or may not have the understanding to say why it’s good, or where its quality lapses. They might recognise only the more obvious aspects of functional quality in it, mistaking those for its deeper excellence. That doesn’t matter - it will feel good, or not, and that’s what is important. But we, as its creators, need a clear and effective understanding of what makes documentation good. We need to develop our sense of it so that we recognise what is good about it, as well as that it is good. And we need to develop an understanding of how people will feel when they’re using it. Producing work of deep quality depends on our ability to do this. Diátaxis and quality ¶ Functional quality’s obligations are met through conscientious observance of the demands of the craft of documentation. They require solid skill and knowledge of the technical domain, the ability to gather up a complete terrain into a single, coherent, consistent map of it. Diátaxis cannot address functional quality in documentation. It is concerned only with certain aspects of deep quality, some more than others - though if all the aspects of deep quality are tangled up in each other, then it affects all of them. Exposing lapses in functional quality ¶ Although Diátaxis cannot address, or give us, functional quality, it can still serve it. It works very effectively to expose lapses in functional quality. It’s often remarked that one effect of applying Diátaxis to existing documentation is that problems in it suddenly become apparent that were obscured before. For example: the Diátaxis approach recommends that the architecture of reference documentation should reflect the architecture of the code it documents\. This makes gaps in the documentation much more clearly visible. Or, moving explanatory verbiage out of a tutorial (in accordance with Diátaxis demands) often has the effect of highlighting a section where the reader has been left to work something out for themselves. But, as far as functional quality goes, Diátaxis principles can have only an analytical role. Creating deep quality ¶ In deep quality on the other hand, the Diátaxis approach can do more. For example, it helps documentation fit user needs by describing documentation modes that are based on them; its categories exist as a response to needs. We must pay attention to the correct organisation of these categories then, and the arrangement of its material and the relationships within them, the form and language adopted in different parts of documentation - as a way of fitting to user needs. Or, in Diátaxis we are directly concerned with flow\. In flow - whether the context is documentation or anything else - we experience a movement from one stage or state to another that seems right, unforced and in sympathy with both our concerns of the moment, and the way our minds and bodies work in general. Diátaxis preserves flow by helping prevent the kind of disruption of rhythm that occurs when something runs across our purpose and steady progress towards it (for example when a digression into explanation interrupts a how-to guide). And so on. Understanding the limits ¶ It’s important to understand that Diátaxis can never be all that is required in the pursuit of deep quality. For example, while it can help attain beauty in documentation, at least in its overall form, it doesn’t by itself make documentation beautiful\. Diátaxis offers a set of principles - it doesn’t offer a formula. It certainly cannot offer a short-cut to success, bypassing the skills and insights of disciplines such as user experience or user interaction design, or even visual design. Using Diátaxis does not guarantee deep quality. The characteristics of deep quality are forever being renegotiated, reinterpreted, rediscovered and reinvented. But what Diátaxis can do is lay down some conditions for the possibility of deep quality in documentation.

quality.txt

Explanation and reference ¶ Explanation and reference both belong to the theory half of the Diátaxis map - they don’t contain steps to guide the reader, they contain theoretical knowledge. The difference between them is - just as in the difference between tutorials and how-to guides - the difference between the acquisition of skill and knowledge, and its application\. In other words it’s the distinction between study and work\. A straightforward distinction, mostly ¶ Mostly it’s fairly straightforward to recognise whether you’re dealing with one or the other. Reference, as a form of writing, is well understood; it’s used in distinctions we make about writing from an early age. In addition, examples of writing are themselves often clearly one or the other. A tidal chart, with its tables of figures, is clearly reference material. An article that explains why there are tides and how they behave is self-evidently explanation. There are good rules of thumb. If it’s boring and unmemorable it’s probably reference\. Lists of things (such as classes or methods or attributes), and tables of information, will generally turn out to belong in reference\. On the other if you can imagine reading something in the bath, probably, it’s explanation (though really there is no accounting for what people might read in the bath). Imagine asking a friend, while out for a walk or over a drink, Can you tell me more about? - the answer or discussion that follows is most likely going to be an explanation of it. … but intuition isn’t reliable enough ¶ Mostly we can rely safely on intuition to manage the distinction between reference and explanations. But only mostly - because it’s also quite easy to slip between one form and the other. It usually happens while writing reference material that starts to become expansive. For example, it’s perfectly reasonable to include illustrative examples in reference (just as an encyclopaedia might contain illustrations) - but examples are fun things to develop, and it can be tempting to develop them into explanation (using them to say why, or show what if, or how it came to be). As a result one often finds explanatory material sprinkled into reference. This is bad for the reference, interrupted and obscured by digressions. But it’s bad for the explanation too, because it’s not allowed to develop appropriately and do its own work. Work and study ¶ The real test though if we’re in doubt about whether we’re something is or is supposed to be reference or explanation is: is this something someone would turn to while working, that is, while actually getting something done, executing a task? Or is it something they’d need once they have stepped away from the work, and want to think about it? These are two very fundamentally different needs of the reader, that reflect how, at that moment, the reader stands in relation to the craft in question, in a relationship of work or study\. To help avoid being mislead by intuition, see The compass\. Reference is what a user needs in order help apply knowledge and skill, while they are working. Explanation is what someone will turn to to help them acquire knowledge and skill - “study”. Understanding those two relationships and responding to the needs in them is the key to creating effective reference and explanation.

reference-explanation.txt

About reference ¶ Reference guides are technical descriptions of the machinery and how to operate it. Reference material is information-oriented\. The only purpose of a reference guide is to describe, as succinctly as possible, and in an orderly way. Whereas the content of tutorials and how-to guides are led by needs of the user, reference material is led by the product it describes. In the case of software, reference guides describe the software itself - APIs, classes, functions and so on - and how to use them. Your users need reference material because they need truth and certainty - firm platforms on which to stand while they work. Good technical reference is essential to provide users with the confidence to do their work. Reference as description ¶ Reference material should be austere and to the point\. One hardly reads reference material; one consults it. There should be no doubt or ambiguity in reference; it should be wholly authoritative. Reference material is like a map. A map tells you what you need to know about the territory, without having to go out and check the territory for yourself; a reference guide serves the same purpose for the product and its internal machinery. Although reference should not attempt to show how to perform tasks, it can and often needs to include a description of how something works or the correct way to use it. Unfortunately, too many software developers think that auto-generated reference material is all the documentation required. Some reference material (such as API documentation) can be generated automatically by the software it describes, which is a powerful way of ensuring that it remains faithfully accurate to the code. Food and cooking ¶ Perhaps you might consult an encyclopaedia to read about an ingredient (for example, about liquorice). What you’re seeking is information - accurate, up-to-date, comprehensive information. You may want to know about its properties, its chemical composition, how it interacts with other ingredients, what other ingredients or plants it is related to, what health implications it might have. For example: Liquorice is a flowering plant of the bean family Fabaceae\. Or: Excessive consumption of liquorice may result in adverse effects\. You’ll expect to find information about these sorts of things presented in much the same way for each one. You will not on the other hand expect to find for example recipes, or suggestions on how to cook with it - it is not a function of an encyclopaedia article to tell you what to do. Writing a good reference guide ¶ Respect the structure of the machinery ¶ The way a map corresponds to the territory it represents helps us use the former to find our way through the latter. It should be the same with documentation: the structure of the documentation should mirror the structure of the product, so that the user can work their way through them at the same time. In the case of code, this means arranging the sections of reference documentation to follow the architecture of the software, where possible. Style and form austere and uncompromising neutrality, objectivity, factuality structured according to the structure of the machinery itself It doesn’t mean forcing the documentation into an unnatural structure. What’s important is that the logical, conceptual arrangement of and relations within the code should help make sense of the documentation. Be consistent ¶ Reference material benefits from consistency. Be consistent, in structure, language, terminology, tone. There are many opportunities in writing to delight your readers with your extensive vocabulary and command of multiple styles, but reference material is definitely not one of them. Do nothing but describe ¶ Technical reference has one job: to describe, and to do that clearly, accurately and comprehensively. Doing anything else - explaining, discussing, instructing, speculating - gets in the way of that job, and makes it harder for the reader to find the information they need. It can be tempting to introduce instruction and explanation, simply because technical reference can seem too bare. Instead, link to how-to guides, explanation and introductory tutorials as appropriate. Provide examples ¶ Examples are valuable ways of providing illustration that helps readers understand reference, without becoming distracted from the job of describing. For example, an example of usage of a command can be a succinct way of illustrating it and its context. Be accurate ¶ These descriptions must be accurate and kept up-to-date. Any discrepancy between the machinery and your description of it will inevitably lead a user astray. The language of reference guides ¶ X is an example of y. W needs to be initialised using z. This option does that. State facts about the machinery and its behaviour. Sub-commands are: a, b, c, d, e, f. List commands, options, operations, features, flags, limitations, error messages, etc. You must use a. You must not apply b unless c. Never d. Provide warnings where appropriate.

reference.txt

What’s the difference between a tutorial and how-to guide? ¶ In Diátaxis, tutorials and how-to guides are strongly distinguished. It’s a distinction that’s often not made; in fact the single most common conflation made in software product documentation is that between the tutorial and the how-to guide\. So: what is the difference between tutorials and how to-guides? Why does it matter? And why do they get confused? These are all good questions. Let’s start with the last one. If the distinction is really so important, why isn’t it more obvious? What they have in common ¶ In important respects, tutorials and how-to guides are indeed similar. They are both practical guides: they contain directions for the user to follow. They’re not there to explain or convey information. They exist to guide the user in what to do rather than what there is to know or understand\. They both set out steps for the reader to follow, and they both promise that if the reader follows those steps, they’ll arrive at a successful conclusion. Neither of them make much sense except for the user who has their hands on the machinery, ready to do things. They both describe ordered sequences of actions. You can’t expect success unless you perform the actions in the right order. They are closely related, and like many close relations, can be mistaken for one another at first glance. What matters is what the user needs ¶ Diátaxis insists that what matters in documentation is the needs of the user, and it’s by paying attention to this that we can correctly distinguish between tutorials and how-to guides. Sometimes the user is at study, and sometimes the user is at work\. Documentation has to serve both those needs. A tutorial serves the needs of the user who is at study. Its obligation is to provide a successful learning experience\. A how-to guide serves the needs of the user who is at work. Its obligation is to help the user accomplish a task\. These are completely different needs and obligations, and they are why the distinction between tutorials and how-to guides matters: tutorials are learning-oriented, and how-to guides are task-oriented\. At study and at work ¶ We can consider this from the perspective of an actual example. Let’s say you’re in medicine: a doctor, someone who needs to acquire and apply the practical, clinical skills of their craft. As a doctor, sometimes you will be in work situations, applying your skills, and sometimes you will be in study situations, acquiring skills (all good doctors, even those with long careers behind them, continue to study to improve their skills). At study ¶ Early on in your training, you’ll learn how to suture a wound. You’ll start in the lab with your fellow students, at benches with small skin pads in front of you (skin pads are blocks of synthetic material in various layers that represent the epidermis, fat and other tissues. They have a similar hardness and texture to human flesh, and behave somewhat similarly when they’re cut and stitched). You’ll be provided with exactly what you need - gloves, scalpel, needle, thread and so on - and step-by-step you’ll be shown what to do, and what will happen when you do it. And then it’s your turn. You will pick up the scalpel and tentatively draw it across the top of the pad, and make an ineffectual incision into the top layer (maybe a teaching assistant will tease you, asking what this poor pad has done, that it deserves such a nasty scratch). Your neighbour will look dismayed at their own attempt, a ragged cut of wildly uneven depths that looks like something from a knife-fight. After a few attempts, with feedback and correction from the tutor, you’ll have made a more or less clean cut that mostly goes through the fat layer without cutting into the muscle beneath. Triumph! But now you’re being asked to stitch it back up again! You’ll watch the tutor demonstrate deftly and precisely, closing the wound in the pad with a few neat, even stitches. You, on the other hand, will fumble with the thread. You will hold things in the wrong hand and the wrong way round and put them down in the wrong places. You will drop the needle. The thread will fall out. You will be told off for failing to maintain sterility. Eventually, you’ll actually get to stitch the wound. You will puncture the skin in the wrong places and tear the edges of the cut. Your final result will be an ugly scene of stretched and puckered skin and crude, untidy stitches. The teaching assistants will have some critical things to say even about parts of it that you thought you’d got right. But, you will have stitched your first wound\. And you will come back to this lesson again and again, and bit by bit your fumbling will turn into confident practice. You will have acquired basic competence. You will have learned by doing\. This is a tutorial. It’s a lesson, safely in the hands of an instructor, a teacher who looks after the interests of a pupil. At work ¶ Now, let’s think about the doctor at work. As a doctor at work, you are already competent. You have learned and refined clinical skills such as suturing, as well as many others, and you’re able to put them together on a daily basis to apply them to medical situations in the real world. Consider a standard appendectomy. A clinical manual will list the equipment and personnel required in the theatre. It will show how to station the members of the team, and how to lay out the required tools, stands and monitors. It will proceed step-by-step through the actions the team will need to follow, ending with the formal handover to the post-operative team. The manual will show what incisions need to be made where, but they will depend on whether you’re performing an open or a laparoscopic procedure, whether you have pre-operative imaging to rely on or not, and so on. It will include special steps or checks to be made in the case of an infant or juvenile patient, or when converting to an open appendectomy mid-procedure. Many of the steps will be of the form if this, then that\. Having a manual helps ensure that all the steps are done in the right order and none are omitted. As a team, you’ll check through details of a procedure to remind yourselves of key steps; sometimes you’ll refer to it during the procedure itself. Even for routine surgical operations, clinical manuals contain lists of steps and checks. These manuals are how-to guides. They are not there to teach you - you already have your skills. You already know these processes. They are there to guide you safely in your clinical practice to accomplish a particular task - they serve your work\. Understanding the distinction ¶ The distinction between a lesson in medical school and a clinical manual is the distinction between a tutorial and a how-to guide. A tutorial’s purpose is to help the pupil acquire basic competence\. A how-to guide’s purpose is to help the already-competent user perform a particular task correctly\. A tutorial provides a learning experience\. People learn skills through practical, hands-on experience. What matters in a tutorial is what the learner does, and what they experience while doing it. A how-to guide directs the user’s work\. The tutorial follows a carefully-managed path, starting at a given point and working to a conclusion. Along that path, the learner must have the encounters that the lesson requires. The how-to guide aims for a successful result, and guides the user along the safest, surest way to the goal, but the path can’t be managed : it’s the real world, and anything could appear to disrupt the journey. A tutorial familiarises the learner with the work: with the tools, the language, the processes and the way that what they’re working with behaves and responds, and so on. Its job is to introduce them, manufacturing a structured, repeatable encounter with them. The how-to guide can and should assume familiarity with them all. The tutorial takes place in a contrived setting, a learning environment where as much as possible is set out in advance to ensure a successful experience. A how-to guide applies to the real world, where you have to deal with what it throws at you. The tutorial eliminates the unexpected\. The how-to guide must prepare for the unexpected, alerting the user to its possibility and providing guidance on how to deal with it. A tutorial’s path follows a single line. It doesn’t offer choices or alternatives\. A how-to guide will typically fork and branch, describing different routes to the same destination: If this, then that. In the case of …, an alternative approach is to… A tutorial must be safe\. No harm should come to the learner; it must always be possible to go back to the beginning and start again. A how-to guide cannot promise safety; often there’s only one chance to get it right. In a tutorial, responsibility lies with the teacher\. If the learner gets into trouble, that’s the teacher’s problem to put right. In a how-to guide, the user has responsibility for getting themselves in and out of trouble. The learner may not even have sufficient competence to ask the questions that a tutorial answers. A how-to guide can assume that the user is asking the right questions in the first place\. The tutorial is explicit about basic things - where to do things, where to put them, how to manipulate objects. It addresses the embodied experience - in our medical example, how hard to press, how to hold an implement; in a software tutorial, it could be where to type a command, or how long to wait for a response. A how-to guide relies on this as implicit knowledge - even bodily knowledge. A tutorial is concrete and particular in its approach. It refers to the specific, known, defined tools, materials, processes and conditions that we have carefully set before the learner. The how-to guide has to take a general approach: many of these things will be unknowable in advance, or different in each real-world case. The tutorial teaches general skills and principles that later could be applied to a multitude of cases. The user following a how-to guide is doing so in order to complete a particular task\. None of these distinctions are arbitrary. They all emerge from the distinction between study and work, which we understand as a key distinction in making sense of what the user of documentation needs. The basic and the advanced ¶ A common but understandable conflation is to see the difference between tutorials and how-to guides as being the difference between the basic and the advanced\. After all, tutorials are for learners, while how-to guides are for already-skilled practitioners. Tutorials must cover the basics, while how-to guides have to deal with complexities that learners should not have to face. However, there’s more to the story. Consider a clinical procedure manual: it could be a manual for a basic routine procedure, of very low complexity. It could describe steps for mundane matters such as correct completion of paperwork or disposal of particular materials. How-to guides can, do and often should cover basic procedures. At the same time, even as a qualified doctor, you will find yourself back in training situations. Some of them may be very advanced and specialised, requiring a high level of skill and expertise already. Let’s say you’re an anaesthetist of many years’ experience, who attends a course: “Difficult neonatal intubations”. The practical part of the course will be a learning experience: a lesson, safely in the hands of the instructors, that will have you performing particular exercises to develop your skills - just as it was when years earlier, you were learning to suture your first wound. The complexity is wholly different though, and so is the baseline of skills required even to participate in the learning experience. But, it’s of the same form, and serves the same kind of need, as that much earlier lesson. It’s the same in software documentation: a tutorial can present something complex or advanced. And, a how-to guide can cover something that’s basic or well-known. The difference between the two lies in the need they serve: the user’s study, or their work\. Safety and success ¶ Understanding these distinctions, and the reason for upholding them, is crucial to creating successful documentation. A clinical manual that conflated education with practice, that tried to teach while at the same time providing a guide to a real-world procedure would be a literally deadly document. It would kill people. In disciplines such as software documentation, we get away with a great deal, because our conflations and mistakes rarely kill anyone. However, we can cause a great deal of low-level inconvenience and unhappiness to our users, and we add to it, every single time we publish a tutorial or how-to guide that doesn’t understand whether its purpose is to help the user in their study - the acquisition of skills - or in their work - the application of skills. What’s more, we hurt ourselves too. Users don’t have to use our product. If our documentation doesn’t bring them to success - if it doesn’t meet the needs that they have at a particular stage in their cycle of interaction with our product - they will find something else that does, if they can. The conflation of tutorials and how-to guides is by no means the only one made between different kinds of documentation, but it’s one of the easiest to make. It’s also a particularly harmful one, because it risks getting in the way of those newcomers whom we hope to turn into committed users. For the sake of those users, and of our own product, getting the distinction right is a key to success.

tutorials-how-to.txt

About tutorials ¶ Tutorials are lessons that take the reader by the hand through a series of steps to complete a project of some kind. Tutorials are learning-oriented\. A tutorial must help a beginner achieve basic competence with a product, so that they can go on to use the product for their own purposes. A tutorial also needs to show the learner that they can be successful with the product - by having them do something both meaningful and attainable\. A tutorial in other words is a lesson - a lesson concerned with learning how rather than learning that, because it’s concerned with skill : practical, not theoretical knowledge. Having completed a tutorial, the learner should be in a position to start to make sense of the rest of the documentation, and the product itself. For a product, a tutorial turns new learners into users. An inadequate tutorial can prevent a project from acquiring new users. The tutorial as a lesson ¶ A lesson entails a relationship between a teacher and a pupil. In all learning of this kind, learning takes place through what the pupil does\. Any facts and explanations that are presented in teaching are almost irrelevant to what the pupil will learn - what matters is what the teacher gets the pupil to do. For our purposes, a lesson is a learning experience\. If you are not providing your learner with a learning experience, your tutorial isn’t doing the job it needs to. Obligations of the teacher ¶ It’s not easy being a teacher. The teacher has responsibility : for what the pupil is to learn, what the pupil will do in order to learn it, and for the pupil’s success. The only responsibility of the pupil is to be attentive and to follow the teacher’s directions as closely as they can. There is no responsibility on the pupil to learn, understand or remember - the learner’s only obligation in this contract is to do things as directed. At the same time, the exercise you put your pupils through must be: meaningful - the pupil needs to have a sense of achievement successful - the pupil needs to be able to complete it logical - the path that the pupil takes through it needs to make sense usefully complete - the pupil must have an encounter with all of the actions, concepts and tools they need to become familiar with The problem of tutorials ¶ In general, tutorials are the weakest part of documentation, the most misunderstood and the most difficult to do well. Most software projects have poor - or non-existent - tutorials. In an ideal lesson, the teacher is present and interacts with and responds to the student. A written tutorial is a far-from-perfect substitute for this. You can easily find that writing and maintaining your tutorials occupies as much time and energy as all the other parts of documentation put together. The sheer amount of work required to create and maintain tutorials is much more than that required for the other parts of documentation. It’s hard enough to put together a learning experience that meets all the standards described above; in many contexts the product itself evolves rapidly, meaning that all that work needs to be done again to ensure that the tutorial still performs its required functions. Finally, you will find that no other part of your documentation is subject to revisions the way your tutorials are. You only have to change a reference or how-to guide if something in the product changes, and even then, usually only part of it needs to change. In the case of a tutorial, you may come to the conclusion that the whole lesson should be completely rewritten, because you have thought of a better way to produce a learning experience for the pupil. Food and cooking ¶ Perhaps you have had the experience of teaching a child to cook, in which case you’ll have encountered most of the main demands imposed by a tutorial. As you probably realised, if you didn’t know it already: the important thing in this experience isn’t what you teach the child to cook. The only thing that really matters is that the child should enjoy the experience of working in the kitchen with you, and gains confidence, and wants to do it again. That needs to be the outcome of each learning experience in the kitchen; if it’s not, then even if the child learned something, the learning journey is at risk of being ended there. A teacher always feels some natural anxiety that the pupil should learn. There’s a temptation to press that too hard - which is both unnecessary and counter-productive. The child will learn, in its own time, at its own pace, through the activities you do together, and not from the things you say or show. It will learn important things through repetition, over time: how to hold a knife, that it’s important to wash hands before handling food, how to use measuring equipment, how to time things. It will learn what it’s like to work in the kitchen, where to find utensils. With a young child, you will often find that the lesson suddenly has to end before you’d completed what you set out to do. This is normal and expected; children have short attention spans. As long as the child managed to achieve something - however small - and enjoyed doing it, it will have laid down something in the construction of its technical expertise, that can be returned to and built upon next time. Cooking is a matter of craft\. It’s knowledge - but it’s practical knowledge, not theoretical knowledge. It’s the same for any product: using it is a skill, and when we learn a new craft or skill, we always begin learning it by doing. Writing a good tutorial ¶ Don’t try to teach ¶ Allow the user to learn. In the beginning, we only learn anything by doing - it’s how we learn to talk, or walk. Anti-pedagogical temptations abstraction, generalisation explanation choices information Give your learner things to do, through which they can learn. Only your pupil can learn. Sadly, however much you desire it, you will not be able to learn for your pupil. You cannot make them learn. All you can do is make it so they can learn. As you lead the pupil through the steps you have devised, have them use the tools and perform the operations they’ll need to become familiar with, building up from the simplest ones at the start to more complex ones. Get the user started ¶ Your job is to get the learner started, not to turn them into an expert. Don’t ever be embarrassed to start right at the beginning: a user can skim rapidly over what’s unnecessary, but if they need something and it’s not there, you risk losing them altogether. It’s also perfectly acceptable if what you get the beginner to do is not the way an experienced person would, or even if it’s not the ‘correct’ way - a tutorial for beginners is not the same thing as a manual for best practice. The point of a tutorial is to help your learner set out safely on their journey, not to get them to a final destination. The only reason not to lower the threshold is because you decide that you don’t want the responsibility of teaching beginners at below a certain level, or you judge that a certain level of skill is a reasonable prerequisite for using the product at all. Provide a complete picture before they start ¶ It’s important to allow the learner to form an idea of what they will achieve right from the start\. As well as helping to set expectations, it allows them to see themselves building towards the completed goal as they work. Surprising them with the result at the end will diminish, not augment, the value of what they achieve. It’s very enjoyable to reveal impressive conclusions with a flourish, but you should save that for your magic tricks and novels. Providing the picture the learner needs in a tutorial can be as simple as informing them at the outset: In this tutorial you will build a simple website using Django and deploy it using Docker. Along the way you will use a cloud storage service for handling media files, and will configure your application to use it. Ensure that the tutorial works reliably ¶ One of your jobs as a tutor is to inspire the beginner’s confidence. Confidence can only be built up layer by layer, but is easily shaken. It helps to maintain a friendly tone, as does consistent use of language, and a logical progression through the material. However, the single most important requirement is that what you ask the beginner to do must work\. The learner needs to see that when they follow your directions, they will attain the results you promise. It’s hard work to create a reliable experience, but that is what you must aspire to in creating a tutorial. Ensure the user sees results immediately ¶ Your learner is probably doing new and strange things that they don’t understand. Don’t make them do too many before they see a result from their actions. As far as possible, the effect of every action should be clear to them as soon as possible. The relation of cause and effect should be evident. Finally, each result should be something that the user can see as meaningful. Every step the learner follows should produce a comprehensible result, however small. Make your tutorial repeatable ¶ Unless you’re very lucky, the users of your tutorial will have different levels of skill and understanding. They might also be using different tools and operating systems and you can’t rely on them having the same resources or environment. This makes repeatable reliability extremely hard to achieve, and yet, your tutorial should work for all users, every time\. You have no alternative but to test your tutorials regularly to make sure that they still work as expected. Describe concrete steps, not abstract concepts ¶ Tutorials are composed of concrete steps, not abstract discussion. Be specific and particular, about actions and outcomes. Resist the temptation to introduce abstraction. All learning proceeds from the particular and concrete to the general and abstract. It’s later, after a beginner has encountered multiple concrete examples that they are ready to see a pattern in them and seek an abstract account of what is happening - until that time, requiring the learner to handle levels of abstraction before they have even had a chance to grasp the concrete is confusing and places unnecessary burdens on them. It’s hard to resist this temptation, because once we have grasped something, we rely on the power of abstraction to frame it to ourselves - and that’s how we want to frame it to others. But it’s simply not how learning or successful teaching works. Offer only minimum, necessary, explanation ¶ If the learner doesn’t need an explanation in order to complete the tutorial, don’t explain. For example, it’s enough to say something like: We’re using HTTPS because it’s more secure. There is a place for extended discussion and explanation of HTTPS, but not in a tutorial. Sometimes, even that much explanation is more than required. It can seem problematic that we are asking a user to do things, without much explanation why. In practice, for the learner, it rarely is. The learner is focused on following your directions and getting a result; their time for wanting to know more about the why of what they’re doing will come later. By all means include links to further explanatory material, if you feel it’s required, but try to resist the temptation to interrupt the flow of a tutorial by digressing into explanation. Ignore options and alternatives ¶ Your job is to guide the learner to a successful conclusion. There may be many interesting diversions along the way (different options for the command you’re using, different ways to use the API, different approaches to the task you’re describing) - ignore them. Your guidance needs to remain focused on what’s required to reach the conclusion, and everything else can be left for another time. Doing this helps keep your tutorial shorter and crisper, and saves both you and the reader from having to do extra cognitive work. The language of tutorials ¶ In this tutorial, you will… Describe what the learner will accomplish (note - not: “you will learn…”). First, do x. Now, do y. Now that you have done y, do z. No room for ambiguity or doubt. We must always do x before we do y because… (see Explanation for more details). Provide minimal explanation of actions in the most basic language possible. Link to more detailed explanation. The output should look something like this… Give your learner clear expectations. Notice that… Remember that… Give your learner plenty of clues to help confirm they are on the right track and orient themselves. You have built a secure, three-layer hylomorphic stasis engine… Describe (and admire, in a mild way) what your learner has accomplished (note - not: “you have learned…”)

tutorials.txt