Re: Good/bad docs

["Hutchings, Christa" <cwhutchings -at- HOMEWIRELESS -dot- COM>]

Wayne Douglass wrote:

>There's no excuse for not putting documentation on the CD, especially
when
>there's so much room. But the simple truth is that the Adaptec SW for
>burning CDs is absurdly easy to use - if you know what you want to do
in the
>first place. I use it all the time and I never looked at the manual.
Average
>bozos who don't know a hybrid CD from ISO 9660 might be in trouble if
they
>don't know what they want to do. The online help is OK, but average
bozos
>need some context to help them understand why they would want to burn
one
>kind of CD rather than another.


You're absolutely right that there is no excuse for not including the
documentation on the CD if there is room for it. However, you can't put
it on the CD if it doesn't exist. Perhaps the company was too cheap to
pay a TW to produce more in-depth documentation. Or perhaps the company
relied on the word of too many techno-nerds that the product was
"absurdly easy to use."

Believe it or not, this mentality exists in more than a few companies. I
can think of one corporate VP right now who believed that documentation
of more than a few pages scared potential customers away (this despite
the fact that the customer doesn't even see the documentation until they
have opened up the box). This guy wanted *very* minimalist documentation
for a product that was cutting edge in its field and not as easy to use
by novices as he wanted to believe it was. His solution was to put the
docs on the web - an okay idea for web savvy customers, but what about
those customers who aren't web savvy?

At any rate, calling a novice user an "average bozo" is unwarranted.
Besides, the guy who wrote the article is a regular columnist for
Windows Magazine, and certainly not your average "average bozo."

Chris Welch-Hutchings
Senior Technical Writer
Home Wireless Networks, Inc.
mailto:cwhutchings -at- homewireless -dot- com


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