How to Create a Quick Reference Guide (+Examples)

For service providers and product teams, user onboarding enables customers to set up their accounts independently, adopt processes, and drive value from their new subscriptions or products.

While detailed technical documentation is necessary, it can often be dull and bulky. Customers desire a helpful, quick-hitting document that provides all the fundamental, essential information needed to navigate a new product or service.

The answer can be a quick reference guide, which provides new users with the foundational guidance they need to get started with a product or service and safeguards service agents from being overwhelmed with new customer service ticket requests.

In this article, we’ll explore the concept of Quick reference guides, break down their benefits for customers and internal employees like contact center service agents, showcase best practices for creating helpful reference guides, and present quick reference guide creation tools to enable technical writers.

The Importance of Quick Reference Guides

Web apps, from SaaS products to online service provider portals, often have complex workflows and journeys that can cause user dropoff. Since your functionality has a certain level of complexity, you need to provide user documentation so that your customers can understand the ins and outs of everything you offer – but what about situations where your users need help quickly?

But wait—not only do you have users, but you also have a team of employees. New employees need quick help understanding the lay of the land when they onboard, and both new and seasoned employees have a variety of processes and policies to understand. As the employer, you want all of this to happen fast so that your team can spend most of their time delivering value to your users.

Enter the quick reference guide – a solution for your internal employees and customers.

A quick reference guide can make or break your customer experience. It is user documentation with only essential information so that someone who simply needs to get something done can quickly and easily ascertain the next steps regarding a concept or task.

Quick reference guides for your employees explain workflows, product information, and policies quickly enough to maintain efficiency.

Let’s dive into what a quick reference guide includes and how to use it to help your team and users reach their goals.

Components of a reference guide

• Short instructions on the key concept or task: Each reference guide covers one concept or task and includes an easy-to-read list of steps for completing it within your platform or at your company.
• Essential information: Think of a quick reference guide as a document that only includes the information needed to complete something – and nothing else.
• Annotated visual elements like GIFs, screenshots, or videos: Visuals can often get the point across or support the understanding of text in a simple and time-efficient way. Most Quick reference guides utilize annotated visuals to keep their guides both clear and brief.
• Links to related reference guides: A specific task is often related to another. You want to include links so that users can easily find the quick reference guides for tasks related to the one they’re doing.
• What to do if the issue isn’t resolved: Despite our best intentions, users or employees are confused or unable to solve a specific issue after going through our quick reference guide. For this reason, you should always include links for longer, more detailed documentation and/or an easy way to get help.

Quick reference guides generally include all of these components, but they don’t always look the same or have the same types of topics. Let’s look at some examples to understand the full scope of quick reference guides.

Types of quick reference guides

• Quick product overview guides for new customers and user onboarding: These guides are crucial for helping your new users accomplish tasks and get value from the platform quickly.
• Technical setup guides: Most Saas platforms require initial implementation or other technical processes before users can fully experience their value. Quick reference guides are handy tools for helping customers do this fast.
• Step-by-step guides for complex procedures, advanced tasks, and common troubleshooting issues:  You’ll want to create quick reference guides for your platform’s most complex tasks and create guides to deal with issues that frequently arise for users. This increases the chances that users move through these moments before the point of frustration – and without your customer support team.
• Guides on product updates and new features: Even seasoned users need help when you make significant UX features or introduce new features. Help customers help themselves with reference guides that are easy to find when you roll out product changes.
• Reference scripts for sales teams, call centers, help desks, and customer service teams: Anyone on your team who interacts with users should have quick reference guides to help them help your customers when needed.
• New employee onboarding guides: When someone new starts on your team, they’ll have much to learn regarding the product and your internal work processes. Quick reference guides are an excellent internal solution.
• Company policy and procedural guides: Similarly, all of your company processes should be documented in a quick reference guide format – everything from how to expense something to how to report misconduct. This helps your employees get things done efficiently at the moment.

Benefits of Quick Reference Guides

Now that we know that quick reference guides are utilized both internal employees and external customers, let’s examine the benefits of using this type of documentation in both situations.

Employee benefits

• Improved productivity and efficiency: Quick reference guides teach employees how to do things simply and efficiently so they don’t waste valuable work time.
• Better knowledge documentation and transfer: Whether it’s a short-term issue, such as an employee on sick leave, or a longer-term change, like a new employee replacing a former employee, quick reference guides communicate key tasks and functions when transferring responsibilities so that workflows can keep moving smoothly.
• Enhanced learning and support new hire onboarding: When new employees begin, there is overwhelming information to learn about everything from product details to internal processes. Quick reference guides allow your team to learn quickly and efficiently.
• Increased process governance and reduced errors: As employees move through all of the processes related to product development, legal issues, and so on, you’ll want to make sure that they know exactly what to do each step of the way. Quick reference guides are a great way to communicate the next steps briefly and clearly, decreasing the number of headaches caused by team members not following a process precisely.
• Reduced burden on support agents: By guiding your users with quick reference guides, you deflect support tickets and free up your support team to deal with the most complex customer issues rather than being bogged down by simple, frequent occurrences that customers should be able to solve independently.

Customer benefits

• Streamlined customer and user onboarding: Quick reference guides help new customers gain competence and get value from your platform faster by providing them with the essential information they need to get started.
• Self-service resolution of common issues: Not only does your support team benefit, but your users are also likely to have a better experience when they can solve common problems independently without slowing down their workflows due to communication with your support team.
• Enhanced customer satisfaction: Users who can navigate the platform independently will report a better experience and be more satisfied with it overall.
• Improved user adoption and retention: When you combine efficient onboarding and quick competency with the ability to solve issues on their own, the result is likely visible in how quickly users adopt key features and flows and how long they retain on your platform—a win/win for you and your customers. When quick reference guides are used along with digital adoption platforms like Whatfix, you’ll likely see significant gains in adoption and user retention overall.

Best Practices for Creating Quick Reference Guides

Whether you’re creating quick reference guides for your employees or your users, the following best practices will help you create clear, helpful, and brief instructions that demystify even the most complex processes.

1. Identify and understand your target personas

The key to writing a helpful, quick reference guide is to understand the people who will ultimately read it so that you can tailor your communication to them.  When you get started, you’ll want to ask yourself questions like:

• Generally, would we define the persona(s) likely to use this guide?
• What parts of this task or flow are already intuitive to this persona(s)?
• What parts of this task or flow are likely to confuse this persona(s)?
• What are some familiar words and phrases that this persona(s) likely knows already that can help make this guide easier to comprehend?

By considering the precise audience for your quick reference guide, you’ll be more likely to write a guide they can understand quickly and intuitively.

2. Write clear, concise, straightforward instructional copy

Writing a quick reference guide isn’t like writing a book – no one benefits from endless descriptions or copious footnotes. It should be written with simple, straightforward sentences that only give the context necessary to get the task done.

3. Use annotated visuals that align with your branding

Often, a visual can illustrate something clearly that might have taken you several sentences to explain with words alone. Not only that, but it’s likely that regardless of your persona, there are at least some people who tend to be visual learners.

Depending on the context, visuals such as flow charts that show a process step by step, with arrows in between, or simple charts giving necessary context can be super helpful for anyone reading your guide.

Another bonus is that visuals can reinforce your brand awareness as long as they align with your brand assets, like your logo and brand colors. Work with your team to create on-brand visuals so you don’t miss out on this opportunity.

4. Provide practical examples to illustrate use cases

General, step-by-step instructions will give your guide readers important information – and examples will help them reinforce what success looks like.

Once you’ve given the necessary instructions, provide written and/or visual examples of what it looks like when someone is going through your flow or accomplishing your task. These visualizations are especially helpful when your guide deals with a complex task.

For example, if your guide explains how to generate a full report from your platform’s dashboard, you may want to provide an example of what a finished report will look like. This is motivating and signals to the user what the finished product should look like if it’s done properly.

5. Format it with user experience in mind

Quick reference guides shouldn’t include large blocks of text because it’s difficult for people to ascertain crucial information in such a format.

The best way to make your guide digestible is to use headers for each new topic, bullet points for lists rather than run-on sentences, and jump links when relevant tangential topics occur. You’ll also want to have summary sections, like brief overviews, and concrete action items for the next steps.

Formatting your quick reference guide more intuitively will help your readers scan for what they need and internalize it quickly.

6. Make it accessible with search functionality

Your quick reference guides won’t be helpful if your users can’t find them. Although often overlooked, discoverability is hugely important.

One way to ensure that your users can find your guides when they need them is to implement a search feature on your help desk or within your knowledge base. If users can search for what they’re struggling with, they’re more likely to find the guide they need.

Make sure your guides are also indexed so they appear in Google search results. We know that sometimes users will turn to Google instead of your knowledge base. Indexing covers all your bases so users can find your Quick reference guides no matter where they look first.

7. Analyze its effectiveness with beta tests and feedback collection from your target audience

Like any product initiative, you should ensure that your quick reference guides are sufficient and that they positively impact the user or employee experience. If not, you’ll have a chance to iterate until they are.

One way to check the effectiveness is to do some beta testing. You can experiment with serving users your guide with pop-ups at crucial moments in a complex flow, for example, and then check to see if it reduces drop-off.

Another way to determine whether your quick reference guide is doing its job is to ask for feedback from your audience. For example, you can ask users who view your guide to rate the extent to which it was helpful.

8. Keep the content regularly updated based on user feedback and product changes

Quick reference guides not only need to be created, but they also need to be maintained– nothing is more frustrating for a user than a guide that isn’t entirely accurate.

If your target persona is your internal team, you’ll need to create a system for updating your guides as company policies, tooling, or any other relevant workflow changes. If your user guides are geared toward your users, it’s essential that your guides evolve in tandem with your product iterations.

One way to do this is to create a point person for your quick reference guides who is ultimately responsible for making sure that there is a system in place to keep the guides current.

Examples of Quick Reference Guides

The compact nature of quick reference guides makes designing them difficult. Technical designers must create an informative document packed with information, all in a 1-2 page document that provides clear answers and direction.

Here are a few QRG examples to help inspire your quick reference guide design:

1. IU Health’s quick reference guide on prior authorizations

IU Health has sixteen offices with over 36,000 employees. With such a large, distributed workforce, its difficult for the healthcare organization to standardize procedures, disseminate information, and provide employee support when issues occur.

A frequent issue IU Health healthcare workers face is communicating its prior authorization policy to doctors, healthcare clinics, pharmacies, and patients. With its quick reference guide on prior authorization, it curates all information and tips related to prior authorizations into a two-page help document.

It includes instructions on:

• How to submit a prior authorization request, as well as how to check on status updates and make changes.
• Types of authorizations and the procedures for each.
• Guidelines for submitting prior authorization requests.
• Clinic information.
• Methods for submitting prior authorization, including its online portal, phone, and fax.

2. Department of Commerce’s quick reference guide for its online grant management system

The US Department of Commerce must disseminate information to thousands of businesses across geographical areas, business sectors, and company sizes. To complicate matters, digital transformation in the public sector has led to new digital processes and web apps for submitting documents and managing permits.

One such process is businesses registering for a federal grant, which now happens through an online portal. The Commerce Department created this 5-page quick reference guide that introduces its new grant management system to business owners, outlines registration requirements, and guides them step-by-step through the submission process with annotated graphics for each step in the process.

3. Anthem Nevada’s provider quick reference guide on self-service tools

Insurance is inherently complex and confusing. Anthem Nevada created a quick reference guide for its providers on accessing and using its new self-service tools for Medicaid coverage questions. The four-page document includes how-to questions like:

• How to access the online website and find provider forms.
• How to create a provider profile and start using its self-service tools.
• How to access additional support resources on its new self-service portal, including registering for a webinar, using its chat feature, and creating a help desk case.
• How a new provider can join an existing group.
• Provider enrollment application status inquiries.
• Prior authorizations, and more.

Best Tools for Creating Quick Reference Guides

When you create your quick reference guides, you’ll want to consider various technical writing tools to help you with formatting, writing, and visuals. Here are some of our favorite tools for getting the job done:

1. Adobe InDesign

• Price: $22.99 for the annual plan paid monthly
• G2 Rating: 4.6/5 stars

Adobe InDesign is the flagship desktop publishing and page layout software in the design world. It can be used for simple tasks, like creating a basic page layout, and also help you with some of the more complex aspects of formatting, like aligning and manipulating objects on the page or creating frames and shapes.

The downside of InDesign is the same as with many of Adobe’s design software: there is definitely a learning curve. However, it’s arguably the most powerful software of its kind, and when it comes to quick reference guides, it can help you realize your precise vision.

If you have multiple visuals in your guides that need to be presented in a neat way, InDesign can help you get it done.

2. Canva

• Price: $500 per year, following a recent price increase
• G2 Rating: 4.7/5 stars

Canva is a great design tool for people without professional design skills. You can do anything on Canva, from video ads to birthday invitations to website headers. One of its main value propositions is that you can easily create beautiful designs without any prior design experience by utilizing its incredible UX and vast template library.

While Canva doesn’t offer the detailed editing experience of the Adobe Creative Suite, it’s an excellent tool for creating simple visuals quickly and easily. When it comes to your quick reference guides, Canva is an excellent tool for creating visual elements like flow charts with step-by-step instructions.

3. Document360

• Price: Depends on the package you need, but can range from $200 a month and upward
• G2 Rating: 4.7/5 stars

Document360 is an AI-powered tool that helps streamline the creation and management of technical documentation. It can be used both for your internal team and your user base at large. You can keep all your documentation in one place and use Document360 to help keep you accountable for keeping it all up to date.

When it comes to your quick reference guides, Document360 can be immensely helpful because it allows you to link from your longer technical documentation in your knowledge base to your simpler guides for users who just want to get something done quickly.

4. Scribe

• Price: Depending on the number of people on your team, starting at $12 a month for one seat
• G2 Rating: 4.8/5 stars

Scribe is a tool for creating guides and how-tos of any kind quickly. One of its primary features is the ability to record a session of you explaining something and then sit back while it turns your session into a quick guide for your customers or your team.

Scribe can be an excellent starting point for your quick reference guides. It offers copious editing and customization capabilities to deliver something that is 100% aligned with your original vision.

5. GoogleDocs

• Price: Free, though organizations can pay for the full Google Suite with prices depending on usage
• G2 Rating: 4.6/5 stars

Google Docs is Google’s software for document creation, and it’s ubiquitous for a reason. Not only does it have all of the usual word processing features, like spell check and various formatting options, but it also makes it easy to add media and has a whole host of collaboration features like comments and suggestion mode.

Google Docs is a perfect choice when drafting a quick reference guide. It allows you to add visuals easily, format the page simply, and collect input and feedback from your colleagues.

6. ClickHelp

• Price: Ranges from $175 a month and up, depending on your usage
• G2 Rating: 4/8/5 stars

ClickHelp is another tool for creating, organizing, and maintaining documentation for your users and your internal team. ClickHelp is uniquely valuable because it has excellent reporting features, so you can check the frequency and effectiveness of whatever documentation you create.

Using ClickHelp for your quick reference guides can be great, especially if you’re just getting started and want to generate clear reports showing exactly how many users or employees access your guides and what happens after the fact.

Quick Reference Guides Click Better With Whatfix

Quick reference guides are one aspect of helping your users and employees get things done simply and intuitively. When it comes to your users, you want to ensure that your guides are visible and accessible at exactly the right moment– and that’s where Whatfix comes in.

Using Whatfix Product Analytics, you can carefully monitor your user behavior metrics to understand where you need quick reference guides in the first place. For example, when looking at a particular funnel, you can see precisely where your users drop off. This indicates friction, and a quick reference guide can help mitigate the issue.

You can use the Whatfix digital adoption platform (DAP) to serve your users your guides exactly when they need them with features like:

• Product tours
• Tailored onboarding experiences
• Strategically timed, in-app pop-ups
• An internal knowledge base easily accessible to your users

The Whatfix DAP is a no-code platform, so product pros don’t have to wait around for developer availability to start giving users the information they need, exactly when they need it.

Ready to get started with Whatfix? Book a demo today!