Shopping by reading the manual (was: Post current product user docs to company website)

[Geoff Hart <ghart -at- videotron -dot- ca>]

I haven't been following this closely (not my line of work these  
days), but one related thought you might find interesting:

My wife is currently upgrading her computer and operating system, and  
shopping for replacement software. She's a geek (having worked as a  
programmer and understands Unix far better than I ever will), and is  
quite at home mucking around with her operating system. She probably  
has about 10 times as many utilities and system hacks running as I  
do, and probably spends about 100 times as many hours poking and  
prodding and tweaking her software.

It's enlightening to watch how she goes about the process of shopping  
for new software. First, she does a bit of trolling in the software  
review sites, looking for likely prospects. Next, she hits the  
developer's site and checks out the features list to see which  
options she can rule out from the start. So far, sounds like most of us.

The interesting part is what happens once she's got a few likely  
candidates: she looks for good documentation. The docs, of course,  
tell you not what the software is supposed to do (i.e., the features  
list), but what it actually does and how well it does those things.  
If the software seems promising but the docs suck, she generally  
rules out that product, and may even download a lesser product that  
she can learn how to use -- and how to customize to suit her needs --  
quickly and painlessly.

As we say in the sciences, the plural of "anecdote" is not "data".  
(I've often said it's anecdotage. <grin>) But it pays to remember  
that some folks really do decide how good our product is by reading  
the fine manual.


----------------------------------------------------
-- Geoff Hart
ghart -at- videotron -dot- ca / geoffhart -at- mac -dot- com
www.geoff-hart.com
--------------------------------------------------
***Now available***  _Effective onscreen editing_
(http://www.geoff-hart.com/home/onscreen-book.htm)


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