What Is Scenario-Based Writing?
What Is Scenario-Based Writing?
Adding real-world context to documentation libraries enhances understanding and engagement helping to reduce generative AI hallucinations
Scenario-based writing is a strategy that utilizes real-life situations and narratives to engage people. By adding real-life scenarios to documentation libraries, teams can create more engaging, relatable, and compelling content for users. This approach to writing helps people find answers to their questions that arise during real-world situations.
How Scenario-Based Writing Helps Improve AI Results
Incorporating scenario-based content into a product's technical documentation portal can significantly enhance the effectiveness of generative AI tools in addressing "why" and "what" type questions.
Scenario-based writing enhances the self-service content experiences increasingly provided by technical documentation teams. Infusing real-life scenarios into documentation libraries makes the self-service experience more engaging, relatable, and compelling.
Scenario-based content provides context for users to understand a product's practical applications. Incorporating this content into a documentation library enables generative AI to generate more relevant and insightful responses. By understanding the context in which a product is used, the AI can better address questions about its purpose and functionality.
Why How-To Content Is Not Enough
Large language models (LLMs) like OpenAI's GPT-4o generate human-like responses. Their effectiveness relies on the quality and comprehensiveness of their training data.
Traditional technical documentation—such as step-by-step procedures, reference data, tutorials, onboarding instructions, and quick-start guides—lacks the contextual depth needed to deliver the types of complex "what if” and “why” or "why not" answers users seek. This gap can cause LLMs to produce incomplete or speculative responses, a problem known as hallucination.
The Role of Scenario-Based Content
Scenario-based documentation fills this gap with rich, contextual narratives beyond procedural instructions. It explains the reasoning behind features, design choices, and operational constraints.
Incorporating scenario-based documentation allows LLMs to access a broader, more nuanced dataset, enabling more accurate and relevant answers that address specific user needs and challenges that standard how-to guides usually do not cover.
Incorporating this scenario-based product content into a unified product documentation library helps LLMs better understand the reasons behind user inquiries. For example, when a user asks "why not" use a particular feature, the AI can use scenario-based examples to explain potential limitations or suggest alternative solutions that fit user needs.