RE: Hi-Tech Company Hasn't Used Tech Writers in Years

["Mark Baker" <mbaker -at- ca -dot- stilo -dot- com>]

> This used to be a typical practice (it may still be, but I've
> been out of the
> industry for a long time now).  Military personnel in the field take the
> 500 page manuals that design engineers and technical writers produce,
> tear out the 50 or so pages that contain the information they *really*
> need, then redline it to reflect the way things are *really*
> done.

Some variation on this is typical practice everywhere and for everything. It
comes back to the basic issue of the social life  of information. People's
first point of reference is their own experience. Second, they ask the
people around them. Only third, if at all, do they read documentation.

The ordinary user does not read the docs. The person who reads the docs is
the maven -- the person everybody else asks when they have a problem. Even
when the question is answered by reference to the docs it is usually the
maven who looks it up to answer the question posed by the ordinary user. I
see this repeatedly on our own user's group. Most of the questions asked are
answered in the docs. And, as in all user groups, we have a handful of
mavens who answer most of the questions. And they often answer the question
by referring to the appropriate page in the docs. All this makes perfect
sense, by the way, and is not merely a reflection on the laziness of the
average user -- the mavens are sometimes mavens on the docs as much as they
are mavens on the products -- they know where the answers are.

In many cases however, the mavens don't need much from the docs beyond the
hard core reference material. The rest they know by heart and by experience.
Thus the 50 redlined pages.

I believe there is a fundamental flaw in the user needs analysis that most
of us do. We assume that we are writing for the average user. In most cases,
I am convinced, this is not the case. We are really writing for the maven.
It is the maven who will read what we write, not Joe user. Not every maven,
however, will want or need the documentation -- most have a depth of
experience to draw on. Our real business, therefore, is the training of new
mavens. New mavens may be a very small part of the user base, but they are
vital to the life of a product: no mavens = no market.

I suspect that we would actually do better making our case to management in
these terms as well. Management knows as well as we do that nobody reads the
manuals -- so why put in the effort. The answer is, to inform that one
customer in a hundred who is an up-and-coming maven -- a person who will
support your user community (for free) for years to come. Your company needs
those mavens and every penny spent cultivating and informing them is money
well spent.

Required Reading:

(on mavens) Malcolm Gladwell, The Tipping Point
(on the social life of information) John Seely Brown, Paul Duguid, The
Social Life of Information

---
Mark Baker
Stilo Corporation
1900 City Park Drive, Suite 504 , Ottawa, Ontario, Canada, K1J 1A3
Phone: 613-745-4242, Fax: 613-745-5560
Email mbaker -at- ca -dot- stilo -dot- com
Web: http://www.stilo.com

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