Re: Empiric studies on the impact of documentation

[yehoshua paul <ysp10182 -at- gmail -dot- com>]

I recently participated in an online discussion in which I casually
mentioned how good documentation boosts sales and poor documentation harms
it.
I was asked if there were any empiric studies to back this claim up. I was
not able to answer.
In the technical writing industry, this is considered to be a truism.
Compliments from customers have been forwarded to me by the support team
when documentation has been proven helpful, and complaints when it has not.
I have heard from numerous industry leaders over the past decade examples
of how quality documentation helped close a sale, and how companies
experienced a loss in revenue when documentation was  poor or non-existent.
In addition, there are numerous online articles which argue this exact same
point.
For example:
https://customersthatstick.com/blog/customer-service-techniques/5-reasons-customer-documentation-is-at-the-heart-of-great-service/
And this article
https://divante.co/blog/bad-documentation-hurts-business/
Which referenced this survey
http://www.tcworld.info/rss/article/a-business-case-for-technical-communication-facts-figures/
And this
https://www.yamagata-europe.com/en-gb/blog/why-technical-documentation-is-your-secret-marketing-weapon

And while I am willing to consider all of these sources biased, I find it
difficult to believe that in all the years these arguments have been made,
not one academic study has been conducted to examine them - especially in
countries where technical communication is taught as an academic degree.
How would one go about creating such a study? You could compare the sales
between different companies of comparative size in the same industry
competing for the same markets, in which one of the noticeable differences
between the companies is the customer documentation. Or, in customer
feedback forms, you could add documentation as an option for reason why I
bought this product or am not renewing membership.

Yehoshua

On Tue, Mar 26, 2019 at 8:03 PM Peter Neilson <neilson -at- windstream -dot- net>
wrote:

> At that same time (around 1970-1975) the Digital Equipment PDP-8 cards
> were just slightly too large for some shirt pockets, and that was
> apparently the inspiration for the careful measurement. I avoided wearing
> shirts with too-small pockets. Another obscurity: One of those PDP-8
> cards
> is memorable for its right-up-front spelling of "mneumonic" instead of
> mnemonic.
>
> On Tue, 26 Mar 2019 13:47:40 -0400, <sharipunyon -at- gmail -dot- com> wrote:
>
> > I love this post for the obscure history, and because someone was
> > brilliant enough to measure shirt pockets.
> >
> >> On Mar 26, 2019, at 1:39 PM, Peter Neilson <neilson -at- windstream -dot- net>
> >> wrote (in part):
> >>
> >> The pocket guides, by the way, were a direct copy in format from the
> >> similar and very popular cheat-cards produced a decade earlier by
> >> Teradyne. They were created by Teradyne's sole tech writer, Alexis
> >> Belash. Alexis went to the Brooks Brothers clothing store in Boston
> and
> >> measured the size of the pockets of men's shirts, so that the cards
> >> would fit in a pocket, unlike the huge IBM 360 Green Card (eventually
> >> the 370 Yellow Card). Prime's publication designer was a friend of
> >> Alexis.
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