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You can also subscribe to mailing lists (if one is available). For example, when I worked for a data security company, I subscribed to mailing lists for my company's product as well as the products of our competitors. You can quickly learn what areas give your users trouble and emphasize those in the documentation.
The drawback here is of course as you all know, a minority tend to dominate mailing list discussions and may not reflect the broad base of customers.
Another suggestion would be to talk to sales and marketing. Sales should know what problems the customers want to solve. Marketing should have done research on who the market is and what they are willing to buy. Of course this is only a good resource if they have done their homework.
> If companies don't
> want to spend money on user analysis, and if the user isn't interested
> in being analysed in the first place, then what can you do?
Michael Shea
XpressLink Documentation
c/o ICN CP STS PD 21
+49 89 722-52589
michael -dot- shea -dot- extern -at- icn -dot- siemens -dot- de
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Michael Shea
ROSEMANN & LAURIDSEN GMBH
Am Schlossberg 14, D-82547 Eurasburg, Germany
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