RE: Requesting feedback for a user guide - good or bad idea?

[MList -at- chrysalis-its -dot- com]

I had a special address created (an internal mailing list at 
our company) and I put that address just after the inside title 
page of each doc, with a request to please yell if you find this 
doc to be broken or if you'd like to suggest changes/improvements.

Most of the resulting comments have come from our own field 
people (sales, sales-eng, etc.), but a few have come from actual 
customers.  I still mine the Tech Support correspondence for most 
of my improvement ideas, but I did find that when people took the 
time to make explicit comments on the documents, they did it 
thoughtfully and in some detail ... and occasionally even say 
what they liked as well as what they didn't.  This is especially 
true about beta customers, of course.  In general, I guess it 
helps that most of our customers are re-packaging/re-selling 
our stuff, so they prefer that I get the docs right so that 
they don't have to re-work 'em for their own customers.

I even received a kudos message from somebody in the biz AND in the 
biz (crypto/security, a tech writer), bless her little heart.  :-)

As others have pointed out, the response frequency is very low.
But it's better than nothing, and it cost nothing to implement.
Can't beat that for ROI.

/kevin

> -----Original Message-----
> From: Yeomans, Claire [mailto:claire -dot- yeomans -at- tso -dot- co -dot- uk]

> I am interested in what people think about requesting 
> feedback from readers
> for a user guide.
> 
> My feeling is that I should provide people with an e-mail 
> address for any
> comments or suggestions, 

^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^

Robohelp X3, from eHelp, lets you quickly and easily create 
professional Help systems for all your Windows and Web-based 
applications, including Net. 

Order RoboHelp X3 in May and receive a $100 mail-in rebate, PLUS
free RoboScreenCapture and WebHelp Merge Module. 
 
Order RoboHelp today: http://www.ehelp.com/techwr-l

---
You are currently subscribed to techwr-l as:
archive -at- raycomm -dot- com
To unsubscribe send a blank email to leave-techwr-l-obscured -at- lists -dot- raycomm -dot- com
Send administrative questions to ejray -at- raycomm -dot- com -dot-  Visit
http://www.raycomm.com/techwhirl/ for more resources and info.