By: Barry Millman

Overview

Many organizations produce in-house tools or modify commercially-available tools for their own use. These tools should get documented so they are of use to others in the organization.

If this documentation is not created or is poorly written, it costs you twice:

• The first cost (attributed to any poor user document) is the cost of answering the Users’ questions (technical support).
• The second cost, arises from the lost time of your employees trying to understand the poor User Document.

Psychological costs also affect both the external and the in-house User.

The first cost: Technical support

This is the cost you incur whenever you produce poor (or no) User Documents. It arises for any User when he/she needs technical support. For external Users, the cost is your technical support staff, toll-free telephone lines, etc.

For internal Users the cost is the time spent by the developer or modifier of the tool to answer the questions of his/her fellow employee. This is an expensive technical support cost…these people are usually paid more than your technical support staff. Thus this first cost is even greater for poor in-house documentation than for shoddy documentation released to the public.

The second cost: Users’ time and resources

For Users outside your company, the second cost is assumed by the Users themselves or their employers. These confused Users are expending their company’s time: the time lost trying to get the product to work, and the time spent dealing with your technical support.

For your in-house Users, this cost is borne by your company. It is your employee–on your time– that is wasting your company resources trying to use an arcane product or document. Here is where your deficient in-house documentation costs you twice.

Psychological costs affect all readers

In addition to these time and monetary costs, there are the psychological costs wreaked by poor User Documentation.

For frustrated Users outside your company, your poor documentation results in a negative perception of your company and its products. This may result in loss of business.

For users inside your company, the psychological cost is decreased employee morale, as evidenced from these possible statements:

• Our company produced this junk?
• These people are not a sharp as I thought they were.
• If other employees can produce this confusing stuff, then I can work at that same level.

Thus the ill will outside your company can cost you future sales; the ill will inside your company can cost in decreased employee morale.

Solution: Informal reviews

Once someone writes a User Document for an in-house tool, that document should be informally reviewed.

Self-review

The author can perform the first review on his/her own.

Use your word processor’s spelling checker to correct common errors. You can use the word processor’s grammar checker, however most of these are inaccurate.

Before doing this review, let the document sit for a day or two. This will help you forget what you meant in your unclear writing. When you do the review and you find yourself asking “what did I mean here?” you will have found a place in the document that needs revision.

When doing the review, imagine you are user of the tool and reader of the document. Imagine the tasks that the tool user wants to do. Does the document enable the Reader to find what he/she needs? Is the writing accurate (correctly describes the tool), clear, and complete? Make the changes that would improve the document.

External review

Then, if possible, use an external reviewer (inside your company). To do this, the writer should:

1. Find a potential User of the tool. This should be someone who is not already familiar with the tool, and as similar to the target audience of the tool as reasonable.
2. Have that reviewer use the document to guide him/her in use of the tool. Solicit comments on the document. Note the suggested changes, additions, deletions, clarifications requested by the reviewer. Some questions to ask might include:
   • Does the document tell you what you need to know?
   • Is it easy to find what you need in the document?
   • Does the document answer your questions? If not, what questions are unanswered?
   • Is the document easy to follow? If not, where are the problem areas?
3. The writer should make changes as necessary.

If you cannot perform this “semiformal” review, then get anyone other than yourself to simply read the document, and make suggestions for improvement.

Caution

Make sure that the review process does not become an inhibition to those writing User Documentation for in-house Users. Stress a cooperative—not adversarial—mechanism whose result is quality work. Do not try to create the perfect User Document.

About the Author:

Barry Millman, Ph.D., has a Bachelor of Science in Electrical Engineering (1966, Carnegie Institute of Technology) and an M.Sc. and Ph.D. in Psychology (Human Information Processing, University of Calgary). He has been a consultant for over 25 years, an instructor, course developer, and award-winning speaker. For the past seven years he has been researching and creating resources to help organizations create great User Documents.

Visit: http://www.greatuserdocs.com/ for resources to help you create the User Documents that your Product needs and your Users deserve.

Visit http://www.greatuserdocs.com/ReadingRoom.htm for more articles like this one.

Article Source: ArticlesBase.com – How Poor In-house User Documents Cost you Twice & What to Do About it

by Barry Millman

Overview

In your User Documentation, you direct your Reader to perform tasks with your product. If you don’t tell your Reader what to expect when performing those tasks, you will have a baffled Reader, resulting in dissatisfaction and expensive calls to technical support.

Example: Reverse osmosis water filter

I bought and installed a Reverse Osmosis water filter. The instructions told me to fill, and then empty (the instructions foolishly used the term dump, which would have caused the destruction of the system) the tank.

The filter had a capacity of about 100 gallons per day. Thus I expected the initial fill (4.5 gallon tank) to take less than one hour. After about an hour the tank was still filling. Worried, I called the technical support. I was told that it takes about two hours for the tank to fill.

One line in the User Documentation would have eliminated that call: “The tank initially takes 2 hours to fill.” Not knowing what to expect I, and perhaps other Users, wasted the time and money to call the technical support line.

Example: Upgrading a router’s software

I had some problems with my Cable/DSL (Internet-Ethernet) router. The internal control panel made it easy to check for and download updates to the internal software. The system told me that it would take a few minutes to check for updates (good), but it did not tell me how long the update would take to perform once I downloaded the file.

Not telling the User what to expect in terms of time is a mistake. I started the update and after a few minutes of operation (was it working?) I canceled the process. I re-started it again, and decided to wait longer to see what happened. It took a few minutes longer, and successfully completed.

It would only take a simple phrase such as “the software update can take up to five minutes to complete” to reduce the User’s anxiety.

Progress indicators (as displayed in a windowing environment) are often useless. Some go beyond 100%, others are logarithmic: they move quickly in the early processing and wait, seemingly at the end, for a long time while processing is completing. Consider making progress indicators relate to the time of operation, not number of files.

Some progress/activity indicators have nothing to do with the program they are associated with. I have used virus checkers that have abnormally terminated, yet the activity indicator kept on moving. Make sure that progress/activity indicators do reflect activity of the associated program.

File downloads do it

Telling the User what to expect is not a new concept. If you have ever downloaded files, the download site will often tell how long the file will take to download, based upon your Internet connection.

Example: Your product’s indicators

While most examples of telling the User what to expect deals with the time needed to complete an activity, others can be related to the indicators and performance of the product.

I have a small smart battery charger that has a red light for each of the battery positions. Unfortunately, the operation of these lights is impossible to understand, and there is no description of how they work.

Here’s what happens. When you first insert the battery, the light illuminates. A short while later (the charging still has many hours to go), the light goes off. Sometime toward the end of the charging cycle the light may go on again.

This is clearly confusing to the User. The User’s expectation is that when the light goes out, the charging is completed. This would result in a lot of User frustration, as Users would try to use “charged” batteries that were not charged. The developers of the battery charger should explain the operation of these displays.

The bottom line

Tell the Users what to expect as they use your product. Often this information is the amount of time it will take for an operation to complete. For other products, you may have to tell the User what the indicators mean.

Don’t leave your document Readers confused or left to figure things out on their own. Doing so will reduce your Users’ comfort with your product, and increase your technical support costs.

About the Author:

Barry Millman, Ph.D., has a Bachelor of Science in Electrical Engineering (1966, Carnegie Institute of Technology) and an M.Sc. and Ph.D. in Psychology (Human Information Processing, University of Calgary). He has been a consultant for over 25 years, an instructor, course developer, and award-winning speaker. For the past seven years he has been researching and creating resources to help organizations create great User Documents.

Visit: http://www.greatuserdocs.com/ for resources to help you create the User Documents that your Product needs and your Users deserve.

Visit http://www.greatuserdocs.com/ReadingRoom.htm for more articles like this one.

Article Source: ArticlesBase.com – Great Technical Writing: Tell your Users What to Expect

by Barry Millman

Overview

Incomplete User Documents disappoint your Readers. Two attitudes of many Technical Writers result in incomplete User Documents. These two attitudes are:

• Everyone Knows That, and
• The User Can Figure It Out

This article describes these attitudes and presents methods for overcoming them. The result is more effective User Documents and more satisfied Users.

1. Everyone Knows That

The Everyone Knows That attitude makes assumptions about your Reader’s knowledge. These assumptions cause your Reader grief.

Here’s an example of a possible Everyone Knows That. Do you know this:

Tomatoes. Most of us keep them in a refrigerator. However, storing them in a refrigerator will ruin the taste and nutrition of tomatoes. Tomatoes should be stored on a kitchen counter at room temperature, until they are cut. Once cut, tomatoes should then be stored in the refrigerator.

Does everyone know that? What do you assume that everyone knows about your product?

Sometimes your User Documents have to overcome previous User experience. Everyone thinks that they know how to properly (safely) shut off a barbecue…they don’t! The safe shutdown method is described in most barbecue User Documents, but it is not “advertised” (forcefully presented) in the User Documents.

It’s rarely true that Everyone Knows That. Just because you find something to be obvious, it does not mean everyone knows that something.

Here’s another example: How do you use a (combined product — two-in-one) shampoo and hair conditioner? When shampooing, the shampoo is massaged into the scalp and immediately rinsed. When conditioning the hair, the conditioner is massaged into the hair, and remains on the hair for about two minutes. Now, what do the Users do for the combined product: rinse quickly, or let the product remain in the hair?

If you have the Everyone Knows That attitude when you write, you will tend to leave out needed material from your User Document. You will be doing a disservice to your Readers, and to your writing.

When in doubt whether everyone knows something, assume that they do not. Then,

• add some text explaining the topic, or
• tell the Reader where to find information that will explain the topic

Another Caution

Be careful about assuming that just because you explained something earlier in your User Document, your Reader will remember (or even have read) that information. It is rare for Users to read product documentation from start to finish.

When in doubt, add a reference to that earlier (background) information. Tell your Reader where to find it, or provide a link to it if your document is electronic.

Here’s a Thought Experiment: You are a User of products: How often do you read the product documentation from start to finish? If you always do, then ask some other people. (The great thing about this fact — that Users do not read the documentation from start to finish — is that it results in great flexibility in writing, formatting and editing the product documentation.)

2. The User Can Figure It Out

The User does not want to have to figure things out. The User is not reading a mystery novel or any other literature, where he/she wants to think about what is happening.

When someone uses your product, they are using it to meet their own needs. Your product may be central to your life, but to your Users, your product is a means to an end. And they do not want to have to decipher your product documentation.

Here’s a simple example. An e-mail tells you to call someone, but the message leaves out the phone number. You are expected to find the phone number on your own. The writer probably knew the phone number, but left it out. This information oversight gets expensive within a company when the e-mail is sent to many employees…each looking up the phone number on his/her own.

My favorite pet peeve: dates. Within recent memory we “survived” the Year-2000 transition. Yet we still write dates sloppily. We use “06” for a year, instead of “2006.” When we see things like “07/11/04” what is the date it is referring to? Is it November 4, 2007, April 11, 2007, or some other permutation of the numbers. The standards for the format of dates vary around the world. This is an example of both assumptions:

• everyone knows that (because there is a “standard” date format — there is not), and
• the User can figure it out (by seeing if my other dates provide clues to the format)

Don’t leave things for the User/Reader to figure out for themselves. It takes you only a few moments to include the material your Reader needs, and will save many Readers many hours in figuring things out.

Do It:

The writing literature tells you to know your Reader. Here is where you use that knowledge to improve your writing.

Either

• find someone who is like your intended Reader, or
• do your best to act like your intended Reader (you can do it if you need to)

In reading and evaluating the document, look for places where

• the writing assumes that everyone knows that
• the writing expects the Reader to be able to figure it out
• the writing makes jumps that your Reader cannot follow
• the writing makes the assumption that the Reader has read and remembered the entire document

Fix these places. It only takes a few words or sentences.

Everyone will be happier.

About the Author:

Barry Millman, Ph.D., has been a consultant for over 25 years, an instructor, course developer, and award-winning speaker. For the past seven years he has been researching and creating resources to help organizations create great User Documents. Visit: http://www.greatuserdocs.com/ for resources to help you create the content and access that your Users want and need.

Article Source: ArticlesBase.com – Great Technical Writing: Banish These Two Attitudes

Sorry, everybody, I’ve been silent a little too long these last couple of weeks. It has nothing to with you, I assure you.

I took a short holiday at the beginning of August. I had too many things to do to get ready to leave and then a bunch more to do when I got home again.But now I’m back and I have a couple of great articles that will be ready within the next day or two.

As you may (or may not) be aware, I also write and edit the Web Developer’s Blog, and I have some more articles over there to get posted over the next few days. But my web development work is what will be keeping me busy over the next few days.

I’m reviewing my social media strategy to apply it more consistently and appropriately across multiple networks. I need to keep my personal Facebook updates separate from my professional Facebook updates, but have my professional updates consistent with updates on my professional website (which I ignore all too often). As well, I’d like my regular microblogging to appear on Twitter and my personal Facebook page.

From the research I’ve done into numerous social media feed publishers (e.g., Tweetlater.com, Twitterfeed.com, Ping.fm), I think I’ll end up building my own scripts to post my updates through the mutiple channels. I hope it works out. Any suggestions?