As I stated in Charging for doc, most tech pubs groups can’t directly charge, or charge enough, for their products (the documentation and related content that they produce) to claim significant roi. Even so, tech pubs groups continue to get funded, and (typical enterprise software) products don’t get very far along before a resource is put to work on some form of ‘user documentation’.
For most projects, documentation commences without significant discussion of the reasons or goals; but the most common assumptions for documenting products include:
- Legal – documentation is required for sale
- User assistance – documentation adds value by assisting users and reducing support calls
These assumptions about the goals of product documentation fit squarely into the classic cost containment vs. quality tug-of-war: how much over the bare legal requirements should you invest, what is the value of doc’s contribution to ease-of-use, and how much should you spend on deflecting support calls?
Filed under: Monetization, ROI | 3 Comments
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Darryl,
This is one of those issues or problems or challenges or opportunites (depending on POV) that will never go away.Often the issue is complicated by the sense that documentation is not a part of the product. Even your two bullets suggest that is so. Coming from a writing-editing background, I think that Word & Deeds are inseparable. That is, Docs & Apps in our case. Humans do very little without a verbal component involved. Most application usage takes place with a verbal soundtrack accompanying, even if that soundtrack is the silent internal monologue of the user (“this software is crap,” “this software isn’t intuitive,” “O, this is a cool feature,” and even “I wonder how I do X?” the latter after fiddling around with the app or gui to find out how to do something).
Saying that doesn’t add much to your paradigm, but I do think that recognizing that the verbal is inextricable from most use of any product puts us on a different footing from which to start moving forward. Pubs departments, as you know, are increasingly looking at documentation that is developed in collaboration with users, content being developed in wikis as part of a dialog about usage and to increase understanding. The documentation forms of such a dialog, the “living wiki” being one, are emerging. They will look as much like Support as Pubs I suspect. As that evolves, one would no more consider dropping or questioning the value of docs as one would question the need to know what users want.This will not resolve the cost-containment v. quality issue, but it will hopefully remove the lingering, implicit threat to get rid of docs or to regard them as a necessary evil. Remember how Scott McNealy of Sun used to wish for a kind of self-explanatory product that would not require docs? We might get there once products are designed that perfectly match the thought patterns of each individual user..perhaps with the docs being brain implants to re-shape the plastic brain of the user…
I ramble, but am glad to see you writing these blog entries and raising these issues in a broarder context.
Jeff G.
Your blog is interesting!
Keep up the good work!