Practicing data-informed documentation

It’s alluring to use data to drive every sort of decision and action. When you write content for the web, you can gather all kinds of data about your website traffic. Why not put those metrics to work for you? The content marketing industry is experienced at using data to guide content development, but documentation isn’t marketing. While documentation can drive qualified leads and be helpful to prospective and existing customers, the ultimate goal is to support users in solving their problems, guiding them through using the product, and validating expectations about how the product should work. As a result, measuring the success of documentation looks less like calculating the number of qualified leads generated and form fills received based on a specific campaign, and looks more like attempting to quantify usefulness, helpfulness, and quality. Those metrics can be too muddy to measure, but that doesn’t mean that data can’t be involved in the documentation process. Instead, data can…