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Chris Gooch reports: <<We put a page in the back of our manuals which has a
quick questionnaire on the documentation for readers to fill in and send
back, questions like "do you feel the manual is pitched at the right level
technically?", "how do you rate the use of examples" and so on. We've done
this for years - it seemed like a good idea at the time - but AFAIK we've
had no questionnaires returned whatsoever. None at all. Zilch.>>
Pretty typical. After all, nobody reads the manuals, so how would they ever
find that page? <g> Seriously, though, user response cards traditionally
have an even lower response rate than blind surveys, where a 5% response
rate is good. We ran comment cards in one of our report series for ca. 10
years, and got an average of less than 20 responses per year--and that's
with an active, involved audience that regularly conducts dialogs with us,
and probably 90% of the responses were from a single foreign reader who
wasn't even in our primary audience.
<<I was wondering if anyone else had ever managed to elicit such feedback
succesfully. Maybe if we offered a free T-shirt or something?>>
I've never felt that these kinds of feedback forms are of any use
whatsoever. Excuse me: they do have one minor use, and that's to demonstrate
to ignorant managers that you're really doing a great job. So why are these
things useless to us? They're self-selected and highly subjective responses,
with little basis in fact, and worse yet, they provide no guidance on what
to do about the situation. Say you get a response that says "the manual is
too technical": Is this response from an expert user, a neophyte or someone
in between--and how do you know their skill level and what proportion of the
audience they represent? Is the person just having a bad day, or is the
opinion real and important? Did you get the one Andrew Plato in your
audience--someone who criticizes everything? <gdrlh> Which aspect of the
manual is too technical? Which aspects aren't technical enough? Thus: A
waste of paper and time, imnsho.
<<I do get some feedback from 'internal' users, as all our manuals are read
and used by the developers and support
staff here -- one trick I have learnt is that if you can get any new staff
to read the manuals as they are learning
about the product in their first few weeks, they're the next best thing to a
tame user.>>
That's by far the best means of obtaining feedback: real users, really
trying to use the product. After all, what they think about the product is
less important than ensuring that we can actually help them use it.
Microsoft didn't get to the top of the heap by producing products that leave
everyone feeling happy about the quality: they did it by (in addition to
piratically aggressive marketing) producing good products that empower their
users. Microsoft has some of the best usability labs in our profession, and
actually seems to pay attention to them at times. The products are far from
perfect, the documentation often sucks or is full of holes, and the company
could care less what we think (e.g., why else has autonumbering been broken
for ca. 5 years, with no attempt made to fix it?)--but with a little study,
you can accomplish amazing things with their software. So it's not our
opinions of the products that are important, but whether they help us do
what we want to accomplish--and that's the important thing you want to find
out, and you can only find it out by studying real users.
--Geoff Hart, FERIC, Pointe-Claire, Quebec
geoff-h -at- mtl -dot- feric -dot- ca
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