Re: Documenting for the non-typical user? WAS: Fields arranged as a sentence
Eric,
<<This must be the argument that you are using to keep yourself in work.
Applying Paretian analysis to your comment:
What you have written covers the questions of 20% of your audience This means
that to answer the questions of the other 80% you will need to write the other
80% of the documentation as well!>>
Anthony,
I think you've misunderstood.
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.
Eric L. Dunn
I agree entirely. My (tongue-in-cheek) comment was based on the far-fetched assumption that all users read the manuals. If all calls come from people that have not found the answer they are looking for in the manuals and (assumption again) those 80% of non-typical users are all asking different questions, or al teast the same proportion of different questions as the other 20%, then 80% of the manuals remain to be written.
Ant
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