Re: User Manual and Online Help

[Christine -dot- Anameier -at- seagate -dot- com]

I agree with Geoff. Online help and printed manuals serve different
purposes--they should not contain exactly the same material. (To me, "same
material"  includes the scenario where you use the same words but take the
screenshots out.)

As a user, I get really annoyed when I go through the documentation for a
product and find the exact same verbiage in multiple media. For instance, I
once had trouble loading paper into a laser printer (turned out it needed
repair, but I thought I might be doing something wrong). I looked in the
"Quick Start Guide" and the section on loading paper was completely
unhelpful. So I went around the office hunting for the manual. Found it,
looked in it, and there was the same useless material, much to my
exasperation. Next I dug around and found the driver installation CD,
which--hooray--had a couple of PDF files on it. Located the appropriate
one, opened it, guess what I found: the same words that didn't help me the
first time around. Seething by this point, I went online to their website.
I shouldn't have been surprised to have found a fourth iteration of the
same text. I had to calm down for a while before I could compose a coherent
nastygram to their support department. I'll bet that company's tech writers
were patting themselves on the back about how much time and effort they
saved by reusing the same material in all those different docs.

Speaking from a user's perspective:  when I put down a manual and turn to
online help (or some other different genre of documentation), it's because
either I'm looking for a different type of information, or the information
I found in the manual didn't help me. Either way, it doesn't help me to
have the same material in both places.

Speaking from a tech writer's perspective: this is why I regard "single
sourcing" conversion tools (like the ones that automatically turn a WinHelp
file into "printed documentation" or vice versa) as worse than useless.

my two cents,
Christine




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