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Re: Should the Doc Manager be equal to the Dev Manager? (LONG)
Subject:Re: Should the Doc Manager be equal to the Dev Manager? (LONG) From:"Robert Heath" <heathr -at- us -dot- ibm -dot- com> To:"TECHWR-L" <techwr-l -at- lists -dot- raycomm -dot- com> Date:Wed, 8 Aug 2001 07:14:00 -0700
Andrew Plato wrote:
>> 3. Tech writers are the resident authority on user assistance and may be
>> more customer-focused than development staff.
>> This argument is value-laden and open to debate. I'll leave it as an
open
>> claim.
>
>Yeah, its rarely true. The people who have the most exposure to what
>customers/users want is almost always people in support, sales, or field
>engineers. Tech writers RARELY work directly with customers, and thus
>their ideas of usability are based on ethereal ideas of usefulness and not
>how people are REALLY using the products.
>
Absolutely true for my part of the world. The head engineers on my product
are always flying out to meet with customers, give presentations, and so
on. Our Human Factors team does customer visits. The support people talk to
customers and log calls all day every day. We tech writers are mostly
sitting at our desks and writing or taking notes in meetings with
developers, hearing about customer contact second-hand. We almost always
defer to the judgement of those people when it comes to the content and
usability of our documentation because they deal with the people who use
it. We rarely do.
However, I have to say that I have a problem with this situation. As a tech
writer, my contribution to the usability of the product and the
documentaton comes from learning about the product that I document by
interviewing the developers and putting their claims to the test. I use the
product as I write about it, figuring out how it works, finding bugs as I
do so, making suggestions for changes to the interface, etc. Doing all of
this does not require me to be in direct contact with customers. As a
matter of fact, with so many other people on my product team in touch with
customers, I would think that customers would find it redundant to also be
in direct contact with the writers.
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