Do you design documentation for your product, and want to make your manual more appealing to end users? Are you tired of re-shooting screenshots with every minor software update? Would you like to make help files that not only look better, but are actually more useable? Try Icons for Technical Writers, a simple way to enhance your electronic and printed manuals!

The traditional approach to making a user guide involves taking multiple screen shots, drawing lines and circles and writing text commentary about what the user has to do to achieve a certain goal. While not a bad approach per se, it does put some apparent limitations on your readers and you, the writer.

The reader has to scroll through multiple screenshots, locate the controls on the pictures, and match them with the text commentary. That’s not the fastest way to learn about a simple action, let alone a series of actions.

The writer must make all these screenshots, and keep them up to date with every software update, which can be quite time-consuming. Highlighting the necessary controls on pictures takes even more time. Finally, the resulting document grows so big that it no longer fits on a single page, thus reducing its usability even further.

LuckyIcon Art solves all these issues by introducing an innovative approach to laying out technical documentation. The company offers a completely new layout and fresh look to your guides and manuals with a set of graphical icons that significantly enhance end-user experience with your help system and your software, while reducing the time needed to create the documentation and keep it up to date.

Instead of using a screenshot, highlighting controls and putting text commentary about what the user has to do, you can simply put an icon representing a specific action, such as selecting a menu or clicking a button on a dialog window, and name the control.

In this case, a single picture is worth a thousand words:

As you can see, all the unnecessary material is gone. No need for screenshots, no need for “Click this button” or “Check that box”. Instead, better perception and less confusion. Lucky Icon Art thoroughly tested the visual perception of multiple sets of icons against a large group of target users, only selecting the icons with the very best acceptance and performance among the users.

If you are making a printed manual, in addition to the online version, the Icons for Technical Writers are available in high resolution 300 dpi to make your booklet or manual look as attractive on paper as it is on the screen.

Being a technical writer and a software developer myself, I can recommend this approach wholeheartedly. It does what it claims to do: it removes visual clutter from the manuals and saves time when designing technical documentation.

I highly recommend this approach and the particular icon set as a method to enhance user perception of technical documentation. I have recommended this set to our team leader to use with our own project. For more information, and to get your free demo of Icons for Technical Writers, visit: http://icons-for-technical-writers.luckyicon.com/

If you need more icons for your software, visit: http://www.luckyicon.com/

Olga Zorina
04/23/2007