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Subject:Info - Not Instruction From:Wayne Douglass <wayned -at- VERITY -dot- COM> Date:Fri, 27 Jun 1997 11:37:41 -0700
At 01:14 PM 6/27/97 EDT, Larry Kunz wrote:
>Rick says that companies sell products, and good technical
>communicators inform, rather than instructing, the consumers of
>the products. Elna seems to go even farther, saying that the
>best companies don't even sell products. They sell information --
>information directed at meeting the consumers' objectives or
>solving their problems.
>
I think both Rick and Elna have been deliberately provocative for
pedagogical purposes, but I have been revamping a document set for a product
we call CD-Web Publisher that fits nicely into Elna's scheme.
In my analysis, our current documentation approach is faulty because we have
been treating the product as a shrink-wrap application (which it really
isn't, but that's another conversation), while the customers have been using
it as a toolkit. They have been unsuccessful in some cases because they need
to know more about the entire process of publishing information on CD-ROM
(from file preparation to burning the CD-ROM). Our tool is not hard to use,
but unless customers plan what they are trying to do they will still have a
hard time. My solution is a document I'm calling the _Publisher's Workbook_,
which is designed to lead the customer to consider all aspects of the
search-enabled application they are building *before* they actually use our
product. It is the reverse of our current approach, which is to explain the
application and shovel in general advice on publishing as an afterthought
(consider ISO 9660, here are various platform gotchas, etc.) When I pitched
my suggestions to my boss, I summarized the problem this way: "CD-Web
Publisher is easy, but publishing is hard."
Would this approach make sense for shrink-wrap applications? Maybe. Most
shrink-wrap applications are infinitely configurable even though most of us
don't tweak the application very much. But how many of us have tried to
wrench MS Word in ways that Microsoft never envisaged only to be defeated by
their obtuse documentation of, for example, field codes?
--Wayne
----------------------------------------------
Wayne Douglass phone: 408-542-2139
Verity, Inc. FAX: 408-542-2040
894 Ross Road mailto: wayned -at- verity -dot- com
Sunnyvale, CA 94089 http://www.verity.com
"Connecting People With Information"
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