Re: QUERY: Long vs. Short Manuals

[Michael Loader <softlogik -at- EARTHLINK -dot- NET>]

Melinda M. Carr wrote:

>I also want to know what you think of this issue. Have you tried this?
>Does it work? Are there better ways to make the documentation accessible
>and easy to use? Any feedback would be greatly appreciated. You can send
>responses directly to me, or to the list.

We decided to re-introduce the previous version of an application for $39
instead of the former $169 to get more new customers who might later upgrade
to the new version. I cut the manual from 250 pages to 100. The things I
didn't cut were: Installation, "Getting Started" (feature overview), and
Troubleshooting. We didn't want a flood of tech support calls on a $39
product. I skimped on the User Guide sections, but kept a thorough Reference
Guide section. After a year of customer feedback, the project was a success,
but if I had it to do over, I'd move more pages from the Reference section
to the User section.

We repeated the task for another application and I cut the manual from 150
pages to 90. This had the same goals and the same results.

I'm currently reducing our main product's 550 page manual to 400 pages. The
goal is to reduce our printing, shipping and translation costs. The manual
is very similar in format and content to the Adobe PageMaker manual, which
isn't surprising, considering it's a DTP manual. I am trying to achieve the
savings through the loss of two of the five tutorials and better editing.

Back to the 14 hour a day grind. Regards,

--
Michael Loader
SoftLogik Publishing
http://www.softlogik.com

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