Honestly, I rarely expect users to read the full documentation of my software packages for a number of reasons: (1) They may be busy; (2) Technical documentation can be dry and boring; (3) I wish software is intuitive enough so that users don’t have to read the documentation; (4) I intentionally lower my expectation so that I wouldn’t be too disappointed when I discover that a certain reader didn’t read the documentation at all (e.g., it is hard not to feel heartbroken when a blogdown user doesn’t even bother to read the first chapter of the book).
Write, as if no one would read it.
I was very happy to learn that Marie Dussault actually finished reading the blogdown book in three hours. That was beyond my expectation, and will give me more motivation to work on my future software documentation.
BTW, I found Jesse Maegan’s description very amusing: “I’ll tweak this - OMG WHY IS MY SITE BROKEN?” That immediately brought this GIF to my mind:
Again BTW, can you imagine how amazing my co-author Alison is?!