What word clouds can tell you about your user guides

Someday, some clever person will do a statistical analysis of the frequency of words contained in different user guides to help us gain a better understanding of how to make the best user guide possible. In the meantime, we can use Wordle to give us a glimpse into a few user manuals.

Wordle generates “word clouds” from text that you provide. The clouds give greater prominence to words that appear more frequently in the source text. To get it to analyse a complete guide, your documentation needs to be online and contain a RSS feed. Here are some Word clouds for three companies that provide RSS feeds to their documentation:

Autodesk (Autocad)

Mindtouch

Atlassian (Confluence)

What is surprising is the lack of commonality – very few words seem to be popular across the three examples.