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Ah, but there is no documentation (a marketing decision). Only the online
Help, which has precious little of the marcomm-type material.
I agree completely with the techcomm + marcomm approach, I'm just not sure
that giving the users 3-5 pages of marcomm, and then directing them to the
Help for the techcomm is going to be overly useful to non-technical users.
My instinct says that these users are going to want both questions ("why do
I want to do this?" and "how do I do it?") to be answered in one place.
It's been a very good project, and the people have been great to work with
from a technical perspective. I'm just not sure if they're accurately
assessing the target audience - or if I am, for that matter. It's been a
-very- long time since I would have categorized myself as a "non-technical
user" and maybe my expectations are too high.
That sounds like a great project. Basically, if your task-based
documentation starts with a section saying "here's something you can do with
our software and here's why it's an important thing to do," before saying
how you do it, then I'd use those intro paragraphs in your condensed User
Guide.
I can't remember where it was, I think it was techwr-l, where someone wanted
to know whether it was useful to combine marcomm with techcomm, and the
consensus was that if users understand why they'd want to do something, then
they'll want to learn how to do it and they'll remember better both why it's
important and how to make it happen.
Now you have a chance to put this principle in action and see how it works.
martha
Einstein
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