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<\/a> to give us a glimpse into a few user manuals.<\/p>\n

Wordle generates \u201cword clouds\u201d 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:<\/p>\n

Autodesk (Autocad)<\/h3>\n

<\/p>\n

Mindtouch<\/h3>\n\n

Atlassian (Confluence)<\/h3>\n

\nWhat is surprising is the lack of commonality – very few words seem to be popular across the three examples.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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 \u201cword… Read more »<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[194],"tags":[276,294],"class_list":["post-2573","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-technical-communication","tag-documentation","tag-research"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"\n