Writing anything, it's useful to get into the mind of the people who will be using the software. Who are they, what type of work do they do, and why are they lo

Writing anything, it's useful to get into the mind of the people who will be using the software. Who are they, what type of work do they do, and why are they looking at the page are a few examples of questions to ponder. Step into their shoes and pretend to look at your page from their point of view. One of the things I've found useful when starting from scratch is to just put something out there and then keep the discussions/issues to communicate with people. If you have enough traffic, folks will ask questions. Each question has the potential for a conversation that lets you understand who these people are and what they're looking for. If you have enough interaction, you'll start seeing patterns (FAQs even) for areas that you can improve in the readme file. After you begin to address the things people care about, you'll see a decrease in the amount of questions in the covered areas, indicating that you're improving the documentation. Essentially, what I did was examine the audience, find a metric to measure progress, and iterate in the hopes of improving the docs.