Re: If you could ask your users a question...

[Andrew Plato <intrepid_es -at- yahoo -dot- com>]

Marsha Howard wrote...

> Tomorrow morning, I have a chance to visit a customer site. If you had
> this chance, what questions would you ask to get accurate feedback, so 
> you could improve your doc?

This is a bit outside what most writers could do - but I developed a very
unique way to do this.

First, my company provides technical documentation services to many
companies. However, our largest clientele base is in networking and
network security. 

Next, my company is a value added reseller and solutions provider of many
of the products we document. In particular, we document products for ISS
(formerly Network ICE). We also resell ISS products and provide on-site
install, support, and management. In fact, next week I will be out with
three customers doing network security installations. 

I cannot even begin to tell you what a phenominal amount of insight this
has given us. By working both sides of the customer equation (docs and
service) we have been able to anticipate hundreds if not thousands of
issues and integrate that knowledge into the documentation. 

Its a win-win-win scenario. 

For our documentation clients, its a win. We can bring in sales while
we're helping them document the product. We also know more about the
products and produce better docs. We can also realize revenue from the
sales side, which can offset the documentation costs, resulting in a lower
overall cost to the client.  

For our network security clients, its also a win. I mean, who better to
hire to install and configure a system then the group that documented it?

For us its a win as well because we're considerably more knowledgeable
about the products by actually using them hence our documentation is
better. We can not only provide our documentation customer better
documents because we actually use and sell their products, we can also
provide our network security customers better service because we document
the products we sell. 

I know - this is a little weird - but it works. It also is a boom for us.
While other tech doc places are collapsing, we're growing like a weed
because we have distributed our services across many IT needs.   

Now - for most tech pubs departments, this would be too much to handle. My
firm can do this because we're an independent entity.  However, there is a
way you can implement a similar arrangement. 

Go volunteer to do client work. Offer to tag along with your feild reps.
They may look at you funny, tell them you want to see what they do.
Participate in the process of rolling your products out to customers and
see what they say. You don't need to meet every customer, just a few. 

Mostly, don't think about it in terms of "what do you want in the docs." 
That's an impossible question to answer. Its also a "doc-centric" point of
view. Think of it in terms of "what do these people do and what is
important to them - and how can the documents mesh with that." Rather than
try to make the docs reflect what the customer asks for, determine what
the customers do and make the docs reflect that. Remember, input from a
few customers does not make a trend. You have to abstract out key ideas
and then integrate that into your docs.

Andrew Plato 

__________________________________________________
Do You Yahoo!?
Make international calls for as low as $.04/minute with Yahoo! Messenger
http://phonecard.yahoo.com/

^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^

*** Deva(tm) Tools for Dreamweaver and Deva(tm) Search ***
Build Contents, Indexes, and Search for Web Sites and Help Systems
Available now at http://www.devahelp.com or info -at- devahelp -dot- com

Learn about tools and technologies for user assistance developers at
The Help Technology Conference, August 21-24 in Boston, MA
Details and online registration at http://www.SolutionsEvents.com


---
You are currently subscribed to techwr-l as: archive -at- raycomm -dot- com
To unsubscribe send a blank email to leave-techwr-l-obscured -at- lists -dot- raycomm -dot- com
Send administrative questions to ejray -at- raycomm -dot- com -dot-  Visit 
http://www.raycomm.com/techwhirl/ for more resources and info.