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RE: Documenting for the non-typical user? WAS: Fields arranged as a sentence
Subject:RE: Documenting for the non-typical user? WAS: Fields arranged as a sentence From:"Mike Bradley" <mbradley -at- techpubs -dot- com> To:"TECHWR-L" <techwr-l -at- lists -dot- raycomm -dot- com> Date:Wed, 20 Nov 2002 11:50:48 -0800
> If the non-typical user is creating 80% of the support calls,
> 80% of the documentation should be aimed at this non-typical
> user. The percentage of total users that this non-typical
> user represents may be incredibly small but is undetermined.
> It may even only be 1% of the user base. But for effective
> documentation and to eliminate support calls, 80% of the
> documentation effort should be for the 1% of the user base
> and 20% for the other 99% of the user base. The idea that was
> proposed (and one that I think is the truth) is that the
> typical user of the product is NOT necessarily the typical
> user or target audience of the documentation.
Boy, I don't agree at all. Those 20% are never going to be well-served by
documentation. They're not simply non-typical; they're a broadly
heterogeneous mix. For some, instructions in a book just don't work; they're
the ones who, in college, got more out of going to lectures than reading the
texts. For others, GUIs don't work; they're the ones who yearn for the good
old days of control-character commands and vi. For others, the English
language is a challenge. Et cetera.
Customer support exists precisely for these folks. Sure, you can sometimes
reduce calls to customer support by changing your docs or your app, but
targeting your docs on these folks is entirely the wrong approach.
In my opinion ...
= Mike Bradley
Tech Pubs
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