Choose Your Own Adventure vs. a Garden Pathway
Remember the Choose Your Own Adventure™ series at your local library?
![A book cover for Choose Your Own Adventure: Supercomputer](https://cdn.uploads.micro.blog/5498/2024/supercomputer-cyoa-large-cropped.jpg)
If not, here was the basic rhythm:
You have stumbled into The Villain’s Lair. The Villain is facing away from you.
You see a table with some stuff and a door labeled “EXIT” nearby.
What do you do?
• Page 13 - find something on the table to defeat The Villain.
• Page 93 - sprint toward the “EXIT” door.
• Page 55 - scream.
Depending on your page choice, your adventure continued or it ended (typically in a Game Over fashion).
Well, I was once asked to add an app’s existing user manual to a set of other user manuals. It was presented as a straightforward copy-and-paste project.
The problem? I discovered this manual’s structure and voice vastly differed from the others.
How? You guessed it: it was written in Choose Your Own Adventure form.
My first order of business was to map out the flow of information and decision points using Freeform.
![Flow of information and decision points for an app's user manual](https://cdn.uploads.micro.blog/5498/2024/technical-writingchoose-your-own-adventure.png)
I then distilled the app’s main functions into a topical outline. In a couple days time, this (truly) lovely app had a user manual that harmonized in structure and tone with its new siblings’ existing user manuals.
So, that got me thinking: can you write effective technical documentation – user manuals, support articles, etc. – as a Choose Your Own Adventure?
In this instance, since One of These Things Was Not Like the Others, I put forth the effort to make this manual feel like a part of an existing whole.
That said, most of the time, the answer is: No.
A big reason why I remember Choose Your Own Adventure books fondly is because I was a kid and had all the time in the world. But once someone cracks open a physical manual or clicks Help
, as the old reality show trope goes: your time starts… now.
That’s not to say technical documentation must be a sterile experience.
What if we who write those docs thought of these as garden pathways?
![A simple, vibrant garden pathway](https://cdn.uploads.micro.blog/5498/2024/63garden-path-2307006441.jpg)
You can go pretty deep researching the form and function of garden pathways, but look at all of these possibilities!
Plus, if someone stops along the way to see a flower in bloom, a dragonfly, or take an alternate path, likely the experience will still be refreshing.
A pathway accomplishes all of this while keeping its core objective in focus: to guide someone from here to there.
While technical documentation doesn’t have to be a drab experience for the reader or the writer, leaning into a structure which sacrifices a reader’s time purely for the sake of whimsy or fun can linger in the reader’s memory for a long time. Choose a garden pathway when writing your next user manual or support article and you’ll add a welcome respite to your customer’s adventure.