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Subject:RE: A technique to get on development's good side From:"Joe Malin" <jmalin -at- tuvox -dot- com> To:"TECHWR-L" <techwr-l -at- lists -dot- techwr-l -dot- com> Date:Fri, 13 May 2005 10:59:42 -0700
Dear Everyone,
I want to clarify my idea of being a "user advocate."
I try to be conservative. I'm a former software engineer, and I write
documentation for software developers. I've been working with Windows
since the mid 1980s, with Java since it came out, with J2EE for about 5
years, with PC hardware since 1993. I've written some sort of software
for just about every platform you can think of (except X and Mac,
regrettably).
So, I think that I can represent the interests of highly technical
software users, including developers, system administrators, and other
computer "experts."
I back off from being an advocate for less experienced users. Right now
I work in the area of speech recognition for customer service phone
systems; I don't know much about that field so I *don't* try to be a
user advocate, I try to be the *new user*.
To me, user advocacy is not predicting what customers need or want; it's
more asking questions. What *do* real users need or want? What's the
evidence? Are we making a decision based on any sort of evidence at all,
or just on assumptions? What are the assumptions? My goal is to get
people to think of alternatives. Maybe that's not technical writing at
all, but it's what I do.
joe
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Subject: RE: A technique to get on development's good side
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