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Erika Yanovich wrote:
I plan to:
- conduct a survey on our major NMS customers to look for more detailed info (clues)
- interview a group of customers who will be visiting us soon
- look at competitors' manuals.
I also have my own agenda, mainly pushing for context sensitive help =
(field explanations as tooltips) and embedding some non-printable info =
in the helpfiles, such as video.
Is there anything else I should do?
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Hi Erika.
Your plan sound good, except the video part. I just think that it wouldn't be helpful, and I think the production costs would be hard to float by your bosses (at least to do it right and to make sure the video is actually useful). I think I remember reading somewhere that video is one of those things that seems like a good idea but is rarely used....I can't remember where I read that though. Then again, I could be making it up. I've read too much stuff to sources straight any more. Darn dirty infonesia. :-)
If your customers are complaining the manuals are too bulky, you need to trim information rather than add more. Put your existing docs through a rigorous edit aimed at clearing up ambiguities and keeping things terse.
If all of your information is in your manuals, then you're really faced with a reorganization problem that should be easy enough to fix, especially if you get user feedback. Can you break up your manuals into an installation guide and a maintenance guide? Can you provide checklists for important information or install steps (assuming you don't already have such a thing). What about a quick guide that provides essential steps and has cross-references back to your "bulky" manual (i.e., separate out your manuals between procedural guide, which would be short, and reference guide, which would be much longer).
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