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Subject:RE: Making them read the documentation From:"Michele Marques" <marquesm -at- autros -dot- com> To:"TECHWR-L" <techwr-l -at- lists -dot- raycomm -dot- com> Date:Wed, 25 Apr 2001 12:32:15 -0400
S Godfrey writes:
> In my company, not only our users, but our installation people
> fail to refer to the manual. I set it up to be either read, or
> quickly referred to. But still, our installation people
> repeatedly ask engineering the most basic questions - ones that
> are answered easily in the manual. For whatever reason, no one
> wants to read it.
>
To get people to read the documentation, you have to ask yourself: why are
they not reading the documentation? You may have to improve documentation
and/or access. Also, those people answering questions that could be answered
by the documentation should refer users/internal staff to the documentation
(assuming it takes longer to answer the question than to refer the
questioner to the documentation).
The point of documentation is so that the user doesn't have to waste time
calling Support, and so Support can control costs by not answering the same
question all the time (which should have been answered in the
documentation). But this only works if the documentation adequately supports
the needs of the user, and the user can easily access the appropriate
portions of the documentation.
Some questions you might ask are:
Can users easily get to the documentation? If the documentation is only in
print and PDF, but your tool is a client/server application with lots of
users, they might not have access to the documentation. Perhaps they need
"help" built into the application.
Can users locate the relevant portion of documentation? Most people don't
want to sit and read a manual. They only turn to the documentation when they
get stuck, and they will only look at your documentation if it is easy to
locate the answer to their question. Maybe you need context-sensitive help,
a good index, or a re-write of the documentation that re-organizes
information to be useful in trouble-shooting.
If these are installation or set-up instructions, maybe the instruction
steps are getting lost in the explanations. Perhaps people don't need some
of the explanations you are providing, extra information can be moved to
appendices, or you can make it more clear what are steps.
Is the documentation accurate? Is it correct and does it actually explain
the information? If the information is wrong or doesn't explain what the
user needs to know, the user will abandon the documentation and turn to the
engineers, who are providing this information.
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