Re: What good is it if you can't find it?
Content is useless if it is *wrong*. Its still useful it its hard to find.
I beg to differ. Consider this real-life example: Many years ago, I tried to find out how to kern a word in PageMaker. Naturally, I looked it up in the index, where it couldn't be found either under kerning or any synonym I could think about. I then searched the manual in the places where I thought the procedure might be described - still no dice.*
Finally, I asked somebody else, something I would have done anyway if I hadn't had the manual.
So what was the consequence of having documentation that had correct content but was badly designed, in this case? About 15 minutes wasted time for me plus a significant lowering of my esteem for Aldus, the then vendor of PageMaker. And I still learned nothing from the manual (although I could have with putting in several more hours).
In this case, a badly designed manual was actually worse than no manual at all. The correctness of the content didn't help me one bit: Correct content _was_ useless because it was _too_ hard to find. (How typical this is is open to debate, but that is not the point here.)
The purpose of documentation is not to enable correct information to be extracted, given enough time. It is to enable correct information to be extracted quickly, because the time wasted is money wasted, and making money, or at least getting work done, is what business is all about.
Badly designed documentation is bad documentation, just as incorrect documentation is bad documentation. Discussing which is worse seems rather moot to me - it's like discussing which wheel of a bicycle is more important**.
Regards
Jan Henning
* I later found out that the procedure actually was described in the manual, under some bizarre title.
** The rear one. But would that make you try to build a bicycle without a front wheel?
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Jan Henning
ROSEMANN & LAURIDSEN GMBH
Am Schlossberg 14, D-82547 Eurasburg, Germany
Phone: +49 700 0200 0700, Fax: +49 8179 9307-12
E-Mail: henning -at- r-l -dot- de, Web: www.r-l.de
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Re: What good is it if you can't find it?: From: Andrew Plato
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