Is it usable? was: does quality matter? should it?

["Stansbury, Stan" <SBS -at- dolby -dot- com>]

Up he climbs onto the soap box to proclaim:

Usable and well-used documentation is not a frill. Ever. Unusable and
unused documentation is a frill, and an expensive one; no matter how
well-written or precise or any other high-quality attribute it is.

Do your users read and actually use what you produce? Does it contribute
mightily to their experience of the product? Then obviously it's not a
frill. It's relationship-building tool for the company. And it matters
not how precise or well-written or anything it is. Wikipedia, for all
its flaws, gets 450 times as many hits as Encyclopedia Britannica.

Is what you produce something they take out of the box, throw away, and
never miss?  In that case why bother to write it at all? 

There is marketing value in giving people a beautiful hardbound book
when they spend lots of money on something. If they spend that much
money, they feel entitled to something that looks pretty and expensive.
But often what's printed on the pages doesn't matter.

There is also an evolving body of research that tends to confirm
people's intuition that users don't read the books that come with the
product, and don't even look things up in them. Increasingly even online
is help avoided and people turn to users groups, mailing lists, and
wikis for needed information.

I know this one from personal experience. I've been at war with a
popular online help producing tool for months now, trying to make it
produce output that matches our styles. There is no hard-cover manual.
Natch, it's an online doc production company. The help is out of date.
Tech support is simply wrong. The only accurate source of information is
the user's group on Yahoo. This company's entire documentation staff can
go home and stay home for all the good they're doing me. 

I think companies turn on documentation when what's produced either is,
or is perceived to be, a bad match for the user's needs. I suggest that
you do what you can to investigate that question, and take strategies to
improve usability into your boss. Managers will typically pay for things
that are shown to be genuinely useful.

Stan Stansbury,
Opinionated Writer  


> -----Original Message-----
> Message: 17
> Date: Mon, 14 May 2007 11:12:34 -0400
> From: "Fiona Krycek" <fiona -dot- krycek -at- gmail -dot- com>
> Subject: does quality matter? should it?
> To: techwr-l -at- lists -dot- techwr-l -dot- com
> Message-ID:
> 	<d44413970705140812l64be5036xb3ea3c5ec26f6384 -at- mail -dot- gmail -dot- com>
> Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1; format=flowed
> 
....
> So, my question is, do other people think that documentation is only a
> frill? If you were (or are) working at a company that doesn't take
> documentation very seriously, should this/does this bother you? If it
> doesn't bother you, would you be bothered by the contradictory
messages
> coming out of senior management (contradictory because senior
management
> says documentation is important, but does not support this through
hiring
> or
> planning)? Can you suggest any strategies for managing this situation?
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