Considering the audience for technical publications

There is no real way to tell if you are doing enough, of doing the right things, just from a brief description of your product and your users. The questions you really have to come to grips with are:

• When your user look for information on how to do something with your product, are they finding it?

• When people have a problem using your product, where do they look for information. For instance, if most of them a Googling when they have a question, is it coming up in searches and do they recognize the results they get as the results they want?

• Are people calling tech support to ask questions that are answered in the manual? If so, then either they didn't read the manual or they could not find the manual, or they could not find the information in the manual. (Maybe they Googled first and did not find anything.)

• Does your documentation cover the task your uses are actually trying to perform? Most user tasks are founded in real-world business problems and merely use the feature of the product as part of completing the task. But many manual just describe how to use product features without showing how they relate to business tasks. Are your users struggling to connect your product's features to their business problems?

• Does your documentation address users at their level? Does it make the right assumptions about how they are trained, the experiences they have had, and the tasks they are trying to perform. Does it speak to them in terms that are familiar to them?

Finally, you have to decide what you are trying to accomplish with your documentation:

• Are your just trying to meet regulatory requirements? Sometimes a company owns a market niche and does not have to differentiate themselves through ease of use or advertise themselves through high quality content. In this case the only people you have to satisfy are the lawyers.

• Are you trying to make sure your core customers are successful and reduce the adoption costs of your product for them? In this case you need to make sure you are covering the core tasks at the right level so that users can get up to speed quickly.

• Are you trying to establish thought leadership and increase your visibility in a competitive market by emphasizing ease of use? In that case you need to produce really high quality documentation that goes beyond core functions and help people address their business problems. Documentation can be a huge source of lead generation for your company if you are addressing business problems that people are search for solutions to on the Web. It can also bolster the reputation as a company that really understands the business space, which can increase potential customers confidence in your product.

Many business, of course, just do whatever they see other similar businesses doing, or what they conceive the conventions of their industry to be. But the way people access information, the level of communication they expect from vendors, and the way the shop for technology have all changed radically and the old conventions don't apply today. This opens up a huge potential for companies that get content right for the new world, and huge peril for those whose competitors get it right before them.

posted about 7 years ago

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Mark Baker‭

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