RE: Refining My "Cutting Edge" Technical Writing Skills Post

[MList -at- chrysalis-its -dot- com]

Chuck Martin [mailto:cm -at- writeforyou -dot- com]

> If you don't know your users at least as well as you know 
> your product, how
> can you communicate effectively with them?

You do what the rest of us do, who don't have either time 
or a budget to visit customers: you fake it.

You spend a lot of time with Sales Engineering and with 
Customer Support, both of whom spend their days immersed 
in the customers' lives and inner workings, and you try 
to bring some of that second-hand understanding into your 
product documents, in addition to your knowledge of how 
the product works "in vitro".

And you re-visit with each product release, watching the 
incoming trouble reports, watching the FAQs, watching 
every discussion you can find about your product and 
about the companies that make use of it, and tweaking 
your text to better match that dimly perceived real 
world.

Did that answer your question?
Was it a surprise?  I'm not being sarcastic, I'm just 
marvelling that there indeed ARE companies where the 
tech writers get to do outlandish stuff like:

a) carry out market surveys about their documentation
   with an actual budget for incentives

b) run supervised user testing with actual users, or 
   even with "dummies" hired to make like users

c) go on the mythical "customer visit" and actually 
   observe customers in the wild

d) sit down with real, live customer/users and chat about 
   the product, the documents, and how the latter might 
   improve to make the former easier/better to use in the
   customer's context.

I've only ever heard about that stuff. Never met it in person.

cheers,

/kevin

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