Documentation users rely on headings to quickly locate content of interest, so they should be easily identifiable and provide meaningful context/keywords in a consistent way. Within these golden rules, though, there’s ample room for customisation to reinforce a particular document/provider’s brand.
- Make your headings visually consistent and distinct from your main text. Choosing a different font is a simple first step: ideally, if your body text is serif, choose sans-serif for your headings, and vice-versa. Use a different colour to your body text, but check that your chosen colour is readable in all anticipated delivery formats – canary yellow might look stunning on your screen, but there’s a good chance it will be unreadable on someone else’s, and almost invisible when printed greyscale. Beyond that, consider shading, borders, underlines, and fancy things like drop-caps to make your headings distinct.
ETA: @fitzpatrickd provided a link to this tool for Windows/Mac that will let you test content for legibility to folks with colour-blindness and other visual conditions, and also made the point that good headings are an essential part of navigation for users relying on screen-readers. - Use similar phrasing in headings that do the same job (usually at the same level). For instructional documentation, for example, chapter titles might use the phrasing “About Feature X”, and sub-sections use “Doing thing Y” and “Doing thing Z”, with sub-sub-sections of “Example of Y” and “Example of Z”. If you can generate an automatic Table of Contents for your document, a quick scan will let you spot inconsistencies.
- Heading numbering can provide valuable context. It’s not suitable for all documents/audiences, but where it is appropriate, it allows readers to quickly understand the hierarchy and relationships of sections in a document. This can be especially useful in long online documents where you don’t have page numbering, need to scroll up/down a bit to figure out where you are in relation to other sections, or might land in the middle of a section after clicking a link. Most DTP packages and many markup languages have options to number headings automatically: avoid numbering manually – it’s a maintenance nightmare.
- Use whitespace to make your headings/section breaks stand out. Indent or outdent headings, or pad with space before/after. If you’ve chosen to stick with a similar font, size, and colour for body text and headings, whitespace might be your saving grace.
- Use consistent capitalisation: all caps, initial caps, sentence caps, title caps, … It’s ok to use a different rule at different heading levels (for example, chapter titles in all caps, heading 1s in sentence caps), but be consistent across headings at the same level.
If you’re getting to grips with using a capitalisation system consistently, many online tools will do it for you automatically till you’ve seen enough examples that it becomes second nature. Here’s just a couple:- titlecapitalization.com – includes options to use AP style or Chicago Manual of Style rules
- llbest.com – all kinds of fun options here, including things like CamelCase, rEVERSE CASE, and the potentially useful option to re-render text that was accidentally typed with the NUM LOCK key on to substitute letters back in instead!
