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Deborah Ray wrote:
> To what extent do you, a technical writer, have contact
> with the eventual users of your documents?
Kent Christensen feels >pretty fortunate to have been able to answer
"always," and perhaps not surprisingly I think this is the way it should be
and I'm disturbed to find my category rating only a 5% response and "rarely"
and "never" achieving 43% and 25% respectively after 100 votes.<
I answered "never". I would have answered differently if I'd been asked "how
often do you want to contact your eventual users", or "how important do you
think it is", but that wasn't the poll question. In seven years of tech
writing, the only time I have *ever* had contact with the end users was
seven years ago, before I was a professional tech writer, when I wrote a
manual of fund-raising activities for Oxfam in Scotland. Even then, most of
the research I did was with Oxfam's records, not with the end-users, but
that was the only occasion I can recall when the only limitations on
contacting the end-users was the amount of time the end-users wanted to give
me, and several of them, once the project was explained, were very generous
with their time and helpful from much experience. I imagine the same would
be true of other end-users. But... Never.
> perhaps I can understand the rarely/never responses if they
>come mostly from contract writers (not meaning to insult with this
>speculation) but otherwise I find this difficult to understand and would
>appreciate some posts as to why this is and why it may or may not be ok.
It's not OK. In every job I've had, I've repeatedly asked the marketing and
development managers to let me have access to the end-users: get feedback
from them, watch them use the software, ask them what kind of help they
require. You are right to feel fortunate to have been in companies that take
that kind of requirement seriously.
>One specific question might be: I assume your firm's marketing folks
>contact the customer--why aren't you part of that? Another might be: do
>your designers/engineers contact the customer but leave you out?
The designers/engineers in companies I've worked with never have contact
with the end-user either (and often, they want it, too). The marketing
department may or may not have contact with the people who actually use the
product, but if they do, they never tell us when. Senior management does,
but they never invite us to come along on their trips <g>, and in any case
they're usually not talking to end-users either, but to their opposite
numbers.
Another aspect of this is, of course, that sometimes the software I'm
documenting doesn't *have* end-users yet...
Jane Carnall
Technical Writer, Digital Bridges, Scotland
Unless stated otherwise, these opinions are mine, and mine alone.
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