Choose Your Own Adventure vs. a Garden Pathway
Remember the Choose Your Own Adventure™ series at your local library?
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.
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?
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.