Deliverables in Experience League
In the publication process, a deliverable is what we create, review, and publish under deadlines. For example, they are guides, tutorials, or courses. Here are definitions of the types of deliverables we publish on Experience League (and some we don’t):
In SCCM, a guide is an online collection of pages referenced in a table of contents. Product documentation guides describe our official, best-practice guidance about using our software. The audience can be end users, administrators, or developers. Example user guide.
A user guide contains overviews and FAQs (concepts), and procedures (tasks) about product features.
Adobe’s product teams are responsible for these guides. Important: Adobe can be held contractually accountable for the information in product documentation.
A tutorial is often defined as a set of instructions to help a user accomplish a use case. As a comparison, if product documentation describes how to install an oven, a tutorial describes how to bake a certain type of cake.
Tutorials can be video or text-based and can range from a single article or video to a larger, multi-step set of text and video-based guidance. They are created and managed in the -learn repositories and published to the Tutorials section on Experience League.
Tutorials should supplement and link to product documentation rather than repeat information. Writing teams should frequently communicate with tutorial authors to avoid repetition.
developer.adobe.com.Adobe expert-curated collection of content, typically comprised of multiple lessons to educate users about a broad area, use case, or product (like implementation, user fundamentals). Courses are developed for target audience roles/role responsibilities.
See the Experience League Courses landing to browse courses.
Knowledge base (KB) articles are ideally brief write-ups with information that is temporarily relevant and useful in specific situations. KB information includes upcoming outages, release issues, product workarounds, or troubleshooting help for these situations. KBs quickly get outdated and aren’t always managed in the publication process (updated and localized).
If you author KBs and find yourself documenting standard product functionality as part of the article (steps in a task, for example), you should stop writing and instead cross-reference to the formal documentation. If you can’t find the documentation, notify the writer or product manager for that product.
Conceptual information concepts
In information design, overviews come first. They introduce a product or collection of features and describe what they can help you accomplish. Write an overview for:
- Solution or product.
- Large features that contain (but don’t necessarily require) multiple procedures.
Sample overview layout
The following layout shows a sample overview with child sections or topics. Depending on how much information each of these cover, this group could be all on one page, or separate pages:
Fallout reports
Types of Fallout reports
How to interpret Fallout reports
Fallout reports in Report Builder
Fallout reports in Analysis Workspace
Concepts, sections, and topics
A concept precedes a task. They provide background information (the why) that users must know before they can successfully work with a product (meaning, perform the important task, or the how). A concept might also have an example or a graphic, but generally the structure of a concept is fairly short and simple.
Sample concept preceding a task (on the same page).
Think of topics as discreet enough to be separate pages. (In SCCM, a topic is often called an article.)
Think of sections as subheadings on the same concept page. A section represents an organizational division in a topic. Sections are used to organize subsets of information that are directly related to the topic. Multiple sections within a single topic do not represent a hierarchy, but rather peer divisions of that topic.
To learn about creating headings, see headings and page titles.
Procedural information tasks
Procedures, or tasks, answer “How do I?” questions. See Steps and lists for details.
Examples of content and document types (AEP) aep-content-examples
This document describes the different types of content and documentation (hat tip to the Experience Platform content team).
For information about the documentation process, see Experience Platform Content and Documentation process overview (wiki).
To request interface content or documentation, see JIRA Documentation Tickets (wiki).
User interface content
Contextual guidance to help users understand UI elements and workflows.
See How to add contextual help popovers to the Experience Platform documentation and UI (wiki).