A Getting Started Guide may also be referred to as a Quick Start Guide; however, a Getting Started Guide typically guides first-time users with basic steps to get started using your product or service.
A Quick Start Guide is for your users that do not want to spend time with details such as advanced tasks or using your APIs, but they want to build quickly using your product or service.
Both a Quick Start Guide and Getting Started Guide serve the same audience: beginners.
Your Getting Started Guide should help new users get comfortable setting up and using your product, understand what your product or service does for them, and know the key features of your product.
When users finish your guide, they want to feel confident knowing that they can now complete real-world tasks using your product or service.
A Getting Started guide is one of the most important pieces of documentation that helps your users build trust with your product or service.
This guide will help you learn some basic structure around building a guide and learn some key tips for creating quality Getting Started guides. There are also elements of a Good Getting Started Guide section included.
Note: Depending on your information architecture for your documentation, Getting Started could be a section with multiple guides rather than a single guide. This is common.
Creating an Outline or Template for a Getting Started Guide
Sometimes, it can be challenging to pick where to start with writing a Getting Started Guide and what important information should be included.
Creating an outline or template for your Getting Started guide is one of the first steps.
There are a few things you want to consider when writing an outline or template:
- Provide an overview for users to know what you will provide them in this guide and what they will learn. Save them time!
- Show is better than tell. Give users a quick tutorial or a test environment to get hands-on.
- Provide next steps to give your users more opportunities to learn about your product and what they can do.
- Don’t assume that a user already knows something when using your product.
- Keep the tutorial condensed.
- User research can be a great source of knowledge.
A Getting Started guide is one of the most important pieces of documentation that helps your users build trust with your product or service.
This guide will help you learn some basic structure around building a guide and learn some key tips for creating quality Getting Started guides. There are also elements of a Good Getting Started Guide section included.