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Subject:Re: Shipping a product with only the online help From:Guru <guru -at- BOM5 -dot- VSNL -dot- NET -dot- IN> Date:Wed, 21 Oct 1998 12:29:29 +0530
Hello John,
I think it is a good idea to ship products with only the online help. (Has
anyone ever seen/read the Internet Explorer/Netscape/ICQ Manuals? User
Interfaces today replace the need for documentation.) Of course, I am
assuming that your product is a simple off-the-shelf kind of product. I feel
Installation Instructions should be available somewhere because of the wide
range of users (novice to power users). Documentation is mostly not used or
used only for reference. Therefore it is a good idea to skip the efforts and
expenses on hardcopy documents and make the online help stronger and better.
Users can print the entire help if they want!
However, I am not comfortable with your project leader's approach: the idea
of letting the users complain and then we will attend to it. I think you
need to answer this important question yourself first: "Can my users
(majority of them) do without hard copy documentation? Can they manage with
online help?" If the answer is positive in both cases, then you know what to
do. But, if the answer is: "My users expect documentation.", I think you
need to provide the documentation -- even if it is going to be rarely used.
There is yet another aspect to this. If I feel that the product can do with
only online help and the hardcopy documentation is just a
tradition/ritual/habit -- then I would try to issue only the online help and
convince customers to change. This follows from minimalism principles and
ecology needs. Why cut down hundreds of forests to print user manuals which
are not read anway! Also, why duplicate efforts. (BTW, I have been
influenced by the excellent papers on Minimalism in the ~STC Book on
Minimalism: Beyond the Nurnberg Funnel~ edited by John Carroll.)
Just my two cents. BTW, TECHWRL must be really rich collecting all these two
cents! (ha, ha!)
>To my dismay, my project leader has decided to try sending out a product
>with only the online help. No installation guide, no user's guide. He says
>he'd like to see how much the customer's complain when they don't get any
>documentation.
>
>Have any of you had clients ship the products out with little or no
>documentation? How did the clients respond? Did they respond at all? Was it
>a PR nightmare to justify the lack of documentation?
