[no subject]

[Ryan Minaker <ryan -dot- minaker -at- gmail -dot- com>]

Hi everyone,

I'm researching to write an article, and I'm wondering if anyone can share
any ideas on *why software and product documentation is getting smaller and
less useable as time goes on*. One example that I use is with video games.
Back in the mid-late 90s (some even into the early 2000s) games still
usually came with solid user guides. These days it seems as though they
give you a quick-start guide and you're own on your for figuring everything
else out yourself. For mel, this usually means sorting through
user-genetated forums for hours... *ugh*

It seems like there's an epidemic out there and user-generated
documentation seems to be getting more and more popular, but it's really
not efficient (in my opinion). Even companies like Adobe, Microsoft have
resorted to this... Last week I was searching for something in Captivate
5.0 help, but I was getting irrelevant user-generated hits for Captivate
5.5 and 4.0 etc. Let's just say it was a serious hassle, and something that
impacts my life constantly.

Does anybody have any ideas why is documentation going away? Is is that
budgets are being cut? Is it the lack of audience analysis... so just let
the audience, who may no be able to write, write the documentation and post
it to a forum? Any suggestions would be appreciated.

Thanks,

Ryan
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