The way I look at procedures has evolved over the course of my career. Like many street-trained tyros, I first viewed procedures as being mere numbered lists. Perhaps broken up by the occasional nested bulleted list with a bit of indented text here and there. But then it dawned on me that I could make the procedures more useful and more usable by incorporating such elements as tables, task lists and topic maps.

This article from UXMatters looks at a number of ways in which you can enhance procedures, advice that works both for printed and online documentation. One cogent piece of advice is:

Put the critical information in the first three words of a sentence

Related posts:

1. When the procedures don’t quite match the product
2. Streamlining documentation
3. Write documentation as if writing for the Web