Why do you need extra documents to tell beginners how to do obscure things? You need them because hours of work time are wasted when beginners become frustrated while trying and failing to perform non-intuitive operations in software. They may not remember how to do some simple operation, or may have never known. Regardless, not having simple learning and memory aids can waste time and can become stressful for many employees in an organization, including you. What if you could go allow current new users to start with all the knowledge that you wish you had known back when you started learning the same thing? What if you could do this efficiently? What if your go-to employee could quickly point co-workers to a document providing easy answers, instead of doing their work for them?
The ongoing challenge of remembering, learning, and teaching is part of what inspires us to create protocols, manuals, training videos, and so forth. However, these are not perfect solutions. Large documents containing protocols, manuals, and standard operating procedures can hide information rather than indicate it. Large paragraphs in these documents can give the impression that valuable information is not currently in view, which can lend to an already-underway feeling of frustration. Nobody has time to read everything before starting and perfectly retain it. Instead, we read most earnestly exactly when we need to know something.
Videos are a special case, similar to seminars, in that they can help the viewer feel confident while they are being viewed. However, many of us learn and retain knowledge by doing instead of watching. If we do not follow up with actually doing something, we can be very much surprised to learn that we do not know how to do that much. Additionally, videos and seminars often seem to completely cover a topic, but we may easily overlook how important connected details and perspectives are unintentionally omitted.
A WIHK-D differs from the above alternatives in that it is a practical quick reference, meant to be used while doing something. A WIHK-D should be concise and easy to reference, and it should feel refreshing because it quickly provides a solution that you desperately wanted. Here is a plain text WIHK-D document that I created while learning Adobe Illustrator, which has many features that are not immediately obvious.
This is not a replacement for other documentation. It is meant to be used in conjunction with the manuals, protocols, videos, and seminars that do the heavy lifting in learning, remembering, and teaching skills. When we learn something simple that we wish we had known, we add it to our personal WIHK-D for the topic, or we add it to the organizational WIHK-D if we want to help others quickly reference the same thing.
The format is intentionally simple: an introductory statement if you wish (I want to...), followed by problems and solutions or questions and answers. Each line is kept as simple as possible, with steps or related information clearly visually associated with the problem or question. Proper visual organization of teaching aids is highly important for learning: visual consistency and implied logic through visuals can teach people who had found the topic too daunting in the past. The more approachable the arrangement and format, the broader the potential audience. Quick reference in simple text is achieved through the relatively unsophisticated but well-known method of using the Find function (Ctrl-F or Cmd-F) to find a keyword associated with an issue. See further below for solutions that go beyond a flat text document.