Improve Your Documentation with Indexes

Published on MadCap Software’s blog on January 13, 2023

Whether we’re finishing job-related tasks or making buying decisions, finding the information we need to successfully answer our questions is critical. Often we struggle during this journey and quickly become frustrated because we either discover only bits and pieces of the information we need or nothing at all.

An indexing tool helps ease this pain. From a business perspective, well-written indexes increase a product’s value and reduce costs because:

  • Customers are more satisfied with the product due to seamless information retrieval in order to use it effectively.
  • Sales from referrals and repeat buyers increase.
  • Customer or technical support calls decrease, which reduce costs.

An indexer is a user’s advocate. The indexer always keeps the users in mind by thinking about how they might look up information in the content. To accomplish this, an indexer provides as many options as possible for users to find the same information in the content.

So, you might wonder, why not just look up the information in the table of contents? It’s because the table of contents and a document index have different roles in the content. Learn more about how to improve your technical documentation through document indexing below.

Continue reading this post on the MadCap Software blog.