Just in time documentation – some pros and cons

Bri Hillmer has written two articles on Just-In-Time documentation (https://www.knowledgeowl.com/home/just-in-time-documentation-a-practical-guide and  https://www.knowledgeowl.com/home/just-in-time-documentation). This is an alternative to what she called Just-In-Case documentation. The idea is you write topics that answer real world queries users ask the Support team. This rather than writing a comprehensive user guide, just in case someone wants to know about topic X or topic Y.

This approach focuses on user needs, answering the questions user have. It also provides users with worked examples, each one aimed at solving a particular scenario. In a complex environment, users may need to combine a set of functions or features in order to solve their problems. Sometimes a topic-based approach doesn’t provide that type of information. Just-In-Time documentation could help users understand individual features and how to combine them. And it may be that 80% of the queries relate to 20% of the product’s functionality.

However, this approach does require the technical authoring team to be able to turn around these articles quickly enough. It’s likely that similar topics will come up a regular basis, so there also needs to be a way to reuse some passages of text, in order for the Technical Authors to work in an efficient manner. Also, there might be a legal requirement to provide a comprehensive guide.

Is this an approach you have used? If so, please share your experiences, using the comments box below.