The importance of quick start guides

A quick start guide (QSG) is a document that helps to briefly communicate the key actions that a customer or user must complete in order to start using their product or service. They are often used to support self-installation; helping a customer to get set up on their own.

They are different from a user guide or manual, which are more likely to look like the book in the picture above.

Why is a quick start guide important?

A good QSG can improve the customer experience and help to reduce costs by lowering the number of engineer call outs and customer service calls for setting up.

Writing clear, comprehensive quick start guides takes practice and experience. A good quick start guide writer should have an understanding of user experience (UX) and be able to put themselves in the user’s shoes, while also cutting down the information to leave just the essential.

This is why user research is such a key part of creating quick start guides. It’s a good idea to involve someone that is external to the company, product or service in question, as an unbiased, and in some cases unfamiliar, view of a product or service will help to produce a clearer start guide for end-users.