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Sean Brierley described a TW who "was updating some software documentation
to a new version without having the
software in question installed." Asked why she didn't run the software, the
writer apparently replied "Why bother?" (or something along those lines)
since her SME was telling her everything she felt she needed to know.
Argh! People like that give tech writing a bad name. If the software is
available, she should be running it--and trying her best to break it in all
the wacky ways users are likely to break it, so she can either get the
developers to fix the inevitable bear traps, or at the very least include
warnings in her documentation.
A lot of SMEs have enormous blind spots when it comes to usability. Her SME
may be blithely unaware of the fact that if you select Shazbat from the
Foobar menu without first entering the Gargleblaster parameter, your
printer catches on fire... or (a little more realistically) that if you
enter a date without including a time in HH:MM:SS format after it, the
system barfs up an error message written in Martian. She's also likely to
take up huge amounts of the SME's time with things she could learn on her
own by just fiddling around with the software.
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