Primary user need: I want to understand.
Explanation provides context, background, relationships, reasons and trade-offs. The subject determines the scope rather than a particular task. It may cover why a product behaves in a particular way, how concepts relate, design or technical decisions, trade-offs between approaches, background knowledge, or alternative ways of thinking about a problem.
It should not become the primary home for step-by-step instructions or detailed lookup information. Short illustrative procedures are fine where they help explain the subject. If users are likely to follow those steps specifically to accomplish a task, write or link a how-to guide instead.
Orientation belongs at the front
Explanation is routinely filed as something a reader reaches once they have already learned the basics. That is the wrong way round for a complex product, which needs its shape explained before any tutorial will land.
We handle that deliberately. An orientation page that gives the reader the model of a system, what its main objects are and how they relate, is explanation, and it is often the correct first page in a section rather than the last. Where a tutorial assumes a mental model the reader does not have, the fix is usually an orientation page in front of it, not a longer tutorial.
The failure we see most often is the opposite: explanation scattered through task-focused pages until neither the instructions nor the concepts work on their own.
