Re: Messages. . .and new thread

[Faith Weber <weber -at- EASI -dot- ENET -dot- DEC -dot- COM>]

Actually this is re: the "new thread" part.

Boy, do I know how you feel about trying to do a process-oriented
manual for a complex system! I work for a company that develops
CAE software for 3-D process plant design. Currently we have only
a command-line interface, though we hope to change that soon. There
are a variety of ways of using almost any of the system's features.
Sometimes we are quite surprised by the ways our users do
things -- they don't always do what we expect, and sometimes they
find a way to do something really useful that never occurred to us.

Anyway, our experience here is that training or support people are
extremely valuable when trying to develop a process-oriented manual.
If you have such people in your organization and can get in touch
with them, go talk to them. Find out what the users really *do* with
the system, and the best methods for doing it. I would not recommend
documenting every last feature in a process-oriented manual. What we
do is document the major features, the ones people really need to learn,
with an emphasis on the basics, and a taste here and there of the
more complex stuff so users know it's out there if they're interested.

In general, finding out what your users want to do is the most
important thing. Next is finding out the best way to do that with
your product. The reason I suggest talking to support people rather
than users (though talking to users is always helpful, too) is that
the support people should know what the software is and is not designed
to do, as well as what users want to do. In our system, and maybe
yours too, it's easy to find a way to do something -- but unless you
find the *right* way to do it, you may not get full benefit
from the software.

While it can feel awkward to document only certain features when
you're accustomed to writing reference manuals, it seems to work.
If you can get users started using the system successfully, and point
out the reference materials (hinting that there's all kinds of other
interesting stuff they can do once they master the basics), they'll
find what they need.

I'm getting a bit long-winded because this subject interests me, so
I'll go now. But if you want to talk further about this, please get
in touch!

Faith
weber -at- easi -dot- enet -dot- dec -dot- com