In an age where we are constantly overloaded with information, the premise of a bite-sized ‘snackable’ version of that same information can be ground-breaking for its users.
Then, what does it take to bridge information gaps efficiently in an organization? Can learning, training, and information be disseminated successfully across teams and functions?
Quick reference guides come in handy here. They serve as easily digestible information capsules that can be consumed on the go.
In this guide, we will explore reference guides, their significance, and how you can easily build one for your team. Let’s start. 👷
How to Make a Quick Reference Guide for Instant Help
Summarize this article for me pleaseWhat is a Reference Guide?
A reference guide is a document that offers end users a condensed set of instructions or information about your product.
The goal of this document, unlike user manuals, is to help find information and resolve queries in the quickest way possible.
Brief and straightforward, it makes essential information accessible to its reader.
Reference guides generally contain easy-to-follow, step-by-step instructions for users to perform a certain task. Due to their brevity, they play a major role in accelerating product or service adoption.
For instance, a product installation guide that comes with a newly purchased gadget. Unlike detailed-focused manuals, these guides focus on sharing to-the-point information that is easily consumable and actionable.
📖 Also Read: The 10 Best Document Collaboration Software Tools
What are the elements of a reference guide?
Quick reference guides are divided by purpose yet united by a common goal to make learning (or training) feel organic and easy.
Whether you’re building a step-by-step guide or a product/process overview guide, here are some essentials that make guides quick, consumable, and effective. 👇
1. Title
While keeping it simple, ensure the title of your reference guide answers—who the guide is for and what it solves—at one glance. This helps end-users discover relevant guides faster when trying to resolve a query. It empowers them to navigate your product or service confidently, increasing the overall customer delight quotient.
2. Content
When writing reference guides, always declutter. Trim down the jargon, complex communication, and chunky paragraphs. This way, your audience can get to the meat of the matter quicker. The faster the information solves their problems, the sooner they can return to enjoying your service.
3. Visuals
The human brain can retain and process images at an impressive speed of 13 milliseconds. Thus, incorporating elements like screenshots, icons, and UI images into your guide to make it visually appealing becomes a no-brainer. Besides, product walkthroughs and instructional videos are much more engaging with visual elements.
4. Format
The purpose of your quick reference guide dictates the most appropriate format for it.
For instance, a single process guideline document may require a straightforward structure. On the other hand, creating a how-to guide would incorporate multiple sections.
5. Brevity
An effective reference guide is almost always skimmable and sticks to a page count of two at the most. Practicing brevity is a great exercise in uncomplicating your product or process information. It makes it accessible even to the technically uninitiated.
👀 Bonus: Learn how to write technical specifications in a way that is easy for everyone to understand.
Why is a reference guide important?
A reference guide must carry its weight, i.e., be self-explanatory while anticipating and answering queries end-users may have.
It all comes down to how accurate and easy-to-use your quick reference guide is.
But before we explore how quick reference guides can build customer loyalty or crescendo delight, let’s dive into why they are important.
Quick reference guides are versatile in that they address challenges or scenarios of varying complexities. In educational institutions, they may be used by teachers to define and standardize curriculum and lesson plans.
Service-based organizations can consult best practice guides to maintain consistency in service delivery and protect their reputation. At the same time, customer experience leaders may use reference materials to speed up training for customer service agents.
Reference guides also:
- Familiarize users with products in a self-paced manner, reducing friction
- Simplify training by documenting and aligning employees and stakeholders, which assists in cutting back on training costs
- Help users find resolutions quicker by providing handy answers
- Improve brand integrity by setting and ensuring service benchmarks are adhered to
Summarize this article for me pleaseHow to Create a Quick Reference Guide
Reference guides are crucial for delivering instructions and outlining key fundamentals, such as culture, processes, or compliance frameworks. Equally crucial is how a reference guide is designed. It must have the right structure and be accessible to its intended audience.
ClickUp simplifies this process by providing an all-in-one platform to organize, design, and deliver your quick reference guides with ease.
Follow these steps to create the perfect reference guide for your audience.
Step 1: Identify your audience
A good and resourceful reference guide aims to address your audience’s pain points and answer all their queries, even before they are asked.
This dictates the information you share and the level at which you share it. The depth of information included in a guide for sales or prospecting teams would differ from what would be included in a product overview guide.
Identifying your audience begins with recognizing the guide’s stakeholders. In case you don’t have a definitive idea already, it may be worth exploring who your guide would impact the most. You can achieve this by surveying existing data, interviewing your industry/workplace peers, and undertaking some research.
As you work to identify your audience, consider using ClickUp Brain, an AI assistant built into the ClickUp platform. This tool analyzes key data such as market trends, customer reviews, and competitor activity.
With audience personas, ClickUp Brain pinpoints the specific needs and challenges of various stakeholders, allowing you to tailor your content effectively.
Step 2: Establish the purpose and outline
With the final audience in mind, it is time to build your reference guide.
Some questions you may need to answer before you do:
- Which information takes precedence?
- How much context-setting is required before you get to the meat?
- Are there certain best practices to consider while developing an outline?
It is a good practice to create a framework that answers your audience’s biggest queries first. Instead of covering an expansive breadth of information, think about hyper-focusing on one topic, subject, or query.
When it comes to building the structure of your guide, ClickUp Brain helps by offering AI-driven suggestions for the purpose and outline. It provides recommendations on important topics and how to best organize the content for clarity and focus.
Step 3: Format content for readability
Your content should meet your audience where they are. This means that unless you are addressing an audience with a technical background, keep industry jargon out of your reference guide.
But it is not just about the language—your reference guide needs to be skimmable and, most definitely, valuable on its own.
If your guide is incoherent without studying other resources, it has no value.
Here’s what you can do to ensure the content in your guide document is useful and understandable:
- Cut ambiguity: Don’t introduce a theme or process if it isn’t pertinent to your existing content
- Simplify: Use language that is simple and universal. When detailing processes, describe instead of relying on technical speak
- Format for clarity: Long, chunky paragraphs can be overwhelming. Break down sentences into smaller paragraphs and concepts in bullet points, wherever possible. Choose fonts that are legible and easy to read
- Keep updated: Information verification is an essential part of this process—especially if you are building reference guides around processes that tend to change
Creating reference guides may not always be quick, especially if they entail details about processes or products that require buy-in from different stakeholders.
In scenarios like this, choosing a platform that gives you the freedom to customize and collaborate while securing document access is non-negotiable. ClickUp Docs can assist with this.
ClickUp Docs
What makes it the clear choice? Well, with Docs, you can:
- Format the document to your preference—from styling options and nested pages to embedding bookmarks and tables
- Search, sort, and filter through the ClickUp Docs Hub to find any document you need, avoiding the time-consuming task of endless scrolling
- You can edit with your team in real time, convert text into tasks, and much more
Step 4: Make your guide engaging
With the structure and content in place, all your guide is missing is a little bit of panache. Why?
People tend to respond to and retain visual stimuli quickly. So, a step-by-step guide/protocol for dealing with difficult customer service calls or using a task management or CRM tool becomes more effective with the right ‘stimuli’.
Elements like videos, GIFs, and product showcases make learning even the most tedious processes or information engaging.
ClickUp Clips lets you capture, record, and share instant screen recordings with the option to integrate voiceovers.
It embeds seamlessly across the ClickUp interface, allowing for quick and convenient screen recording when you need to demonstrate processes or features. You can share your content effortlessly, choosing between public or private sharing and download options.
If you want to make a training video to complement your reference guide, incorporating Clips can significantly enrich the learning experience.
Additionally, ClickUp Brain lets you transcribe Clips on the go, enhancing the accessibility of your reference guides. All recordings are saved and easily discoverable through the ClickUp Clips Hub, ensuring your audience can find the information they need.
To get started with your reference guide, scour through the repository of templates ClickUp has, like this one. 👇
ClickUp Product Brief Template
The ClickUp Product Brief Template is the answer to every product manager’s Hail Mary. When the success of a product relies on cross-functional teams across different stages of development, a consensus is crucial.
This template allows product managers to align every team by benchmarking goals, success criteria, release plans, and functional specs in one accessible document. Whether a product is built from scratch or reinvented, product managers discover one platform to cohesively brief about, track, and manage projects efficiently.
Summarize this article for me pleaseBest Practices to Create a Quick Reference Guide
Quick reference guides need to be exactly that—quick. Depending on the guide you create, this could mean breaking down complex processes or shunning technical jargon.
Here are some vetted and verified best practices to adopt when creating your first (or next) quick reference guide. 🗒️
1. Understand your audience and their needs
The best reference guides become the ultimate checkpoint when your audience wants to understand and navigate your product. That only requires you to anticipate every query they could possibly have.
Reviewing online forums, surveys, or even consulting with teams that interact with your consumers regularly could offer a treasure trove of insights. Particularly around the barriers they face when using your product or service.
This helps you create a checklist and generate the outline for your quick reference guide.
2. Optimize your guide format for readability and accessibility
An important factor to consider when designing your reference guide is making it user-first. After all, it is meant to reduce the product adoption time among users exponentially.
This may mean scrapping your neatly wrapped product pitch and sticking to the essentials, like feature names. Answer your users’ questions first, and communicate in a language they understand.
Drop the jargon and pick up better formatting practices by adopting short and crisp sentences and bullet points wherever required. Add images to engage the reader further. Accessibility of information is key.
3. Include only relevant information
When the breadth and depth of a product are expansive, it’s easy to lose track of what’s relevant.
When building product reference guides, focus on one aspect at a time to ensure your audience has every input necessary to navigate the product autonomously. This means keeping information on other or related functionalities out of the guide.
4. Tweak your content consistently
Reference guides should remain as dynamic as your products or processes. However, this isn’t the only reason you need to audit and amend them from time to time.
A good practice to adopt with these guides is to check in about the purpose they serve your audience. Reference guides need to evolve whenever necessary to reflect changing products, user concerns and expectations, and insights about their usability.
Summarize this article for me pleaseWhat are the Types of Quick Reference Guides?
It is abundantly clear that understanding your audience’s needs is the basis for creating the right guide for them. A bird’s-eye view of your subject of focus cannot possibly serve more specific queries about it.
Here’s a little introduction to the world of quick reference guides so you can make a well-informed choice. ✅
Quick start guides
These guides are simple and fuss-free, meant to help your users hit the ground running. Clear instructions and easy-to-understand illustrations can make the ‘introductory’ guide perfect.
📌 Example: Installation guides that cover software installation and uninstallation.
Product overview guides
This is the perfect tool to help new users broadly learn about a product’s capabilities. While highlighting its core features, this guide offers the perfect platform to establish the value it offers.
Product overview guides are the ideal choice in scenarios where a customer is getting to know a product or the product’s outreach team is preparing a pitch to prospects.
📌 Example: A catalog that covers the offerings of an EdTech product, like a coding kit.
👀 Bonus: Discover technical documentation templates to simplify your writing process with a structured format that helps you capture essential information.
Task guides
Task guides or tutorials are an immersive way to explore certain specific capabilities of a product. They deliver concise and clear instructions to accomplish specific tasks by demonstrating specific workflows.
📌 Example: DIY guides shared by online consumer stores like furniture retailers.
Product update guides
At a functional level, these guides document updates and their meaning to end-users. On the other hand, you can optimize them to showcase your organization’s dedication to enhancing the customer experience with the product.
📌 Example: Instructions for how to navigate functionality updates made to a software or a platform.
How-to or step-by-step guides
These guides are akin to handholding your users through any process. With sequential instructions, how-to guides simplify tasks using detailed information for every step.
Visual aids like screenshots are used to represent comprehensive workflows in a digestible way.
📌 Example: Elaborate processes like rebooting a server or responding to a network error.
Onboarding guides
Like processes, people rely on structure and framework to navigate the world around them. Onboarding guides are a great tool for initiating new team members into an organization’s systems, culture, and practices.
📌 Example: Employee induction processes at corporations.
📖 Also Read: How to Create Effective Document Templates
Quick reference guide examples
Selecting the right template is essential when creating a reference guide. Once you finalize your format, the process of developing the guide becomes significantly more streamlined.
ClickUp provides a variety of templates you can use as examples for creating your quick reference guides.
For example, the ClickUp Quick Start: Project Management Template offers organizations a reference guide template to manage product roadmaps. Alternatively, the ClickUp Brand Guidelines Template gives marketing teams a ready-to-use resource for compiling comprehensive brand guides.
Easy to navigate and customize, here are other template examples you can explore:
ClickUp Writing Guidelines Template
A strong voice and tone are vital for any brand. The ClickUp Writing Guidelines Template empowers brands to maintain a consistent and accurate identity across all communication touchpoints. This includes blog posts, articles, social media updates, and technical documentation.
Ensuring that every piece of content reflects the brand’s values and messaging creates a cohesive experience for your audience. Utilizing custom statuses and fields within the template enables you to manage and track writing projects at every stage effectively. With the integration of AI, automation, and more, project collaboration becomes effortless.
ClickUp Product Documentation Template
The ClickUp Product Documentation Template ensures every product development project remains streamlined. This template offers a centralized platform to define project plans, set budgets, and track the roadmap, ultimately making product specs successful.
Teams involved can use it to track progress, access relevant documents, and keep up with timelines and budgets. Besides offering a platform for project documentation, this template allows product teams to eliminate chances of miscommunication, inaccuracy of information or data, and project bottlenecks—both seen and unforeseen.
Summarize this article for me pleaseCreate Quick Reference Guides That Click with ClickUp
Quick reference guides are the key to simplifying the learning curve while keeping costs down.
Unlike lengthy manuals, they’re designed to be easily updated, ensuring your team always has access to the latest information without the hassle of revising extensive documents or conducting time-consuming workshops
Tools like ClickUp offer many benefits, including streamlined content creation. In addition, its templates provide a solid foundation for your guides, saving time and ensuring consistency.
Get started with ClickUp today!
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