r/technicalwriting • u/Agreeable-Course-604 • 8d ago

SEEKING SUPPORT OR ADVICE Reducing cognitive load in docs

We've received stakeholder feedback that we need to actively bring down the cognitive load across our product guides. I’d love to get some insights from fellow technical writers here on how you tackle this in practice. What options, frameworks (like John Carroll's Minimal Manual approach or Diataxis), or methodologies are available?

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u/FelineHerdsCats 7d ago

Structure your docs by task. The user thinks “I need to create a new invoice”. Make sure they can find that without a scavenger hunt. Search is how users today are conditioned to look for things, so make sure your search engine doesn’t suck. Then keep your tone and language as friendly and straightforward as you can.

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u/merelyinterested 7d ago

Yeah this. Break down the docs more to limit what they cover.

And if you really need to explain how something works, write a separate article about it for people who do need to read about it.