RE: Making them read the documentation

["Hart, Geoff" <Geoff-H -at- MTL -dot- FERIC -dot- CA>]

Sierra Godfrey wonders: <<how do you get those darn users to read your
beautiful technical documentation?>>

You can't. It's human nature--and even more so for people who consider
themselves basically competent in a technology--for people to simply dive in
and try something by themselves; when that fails, they then go ask the
expert down the hall. Documentation, whether online or in print, is usually
the last resort. This being the case, our expertise will increasingly be
used in helping design interfaces that support "just try it" behavior: we'll
write better field labels (Date:), better affordances ("Dates should
resemble 2001-Aug.-01"), and better error messages ("no, you idiot; I said
Aug. not 08" rather than "Date error type 1314" <g>). We're also the ones
who go "this is awfully complex to document, which suggests it's going to be
a bugger to use; how about if we do it this way instead?"

Of course, we could go the other way too: make the product interface so
impenetrable that the only way to use it at all is to read the docs. Never
mind--that's already standard operating practice in some places. <g>

<<This ties in with a bigger question: if they're not reading it, why is it
(or me) necessary?>>

Because when all else fails, and telephone technical support is either
unavailable or (increasingly) prohibitively expensive, they turn to the
documentation. The docs must stand in for the expert down the hall or in
tech. support when these folk are unavailable. We're the ones who reliably
understand this need and create documentation that responds to it.

--Geoff Hart, FERIC, Pointe-Claire, Quebec
geoff-h -at- mtl -dot- feric -dot- ca
"User's advocate" online monthly at
www.raycomm.com/techwhirl/usersadvocate.html

"The most likely way for the world to be destroyed, most experts agree, is
by accident. That's where we come in; we're computer professionals. We cause
accidents."-- Nathaniel Borenstein

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