Attendees at our Clear Point Coffee on June 10 viewed a compelling slide show on the new direction for documentation managers. Doug Gibson, Senior Manager of the User Interface Design team at Symantec, had both good news and bad news to report, but our audience was already well aware of the biggest challenge – the need to rethink documentation in light of its shrinking audience share.
The old complaint ”No one ever reads the documentation” is now closer to the truth than ever. But the good news is that we can help rebuild our audience and refortify our team by focusing on our basic goals. Technical documentation departments and user experience departments are both charged with sharing information with customers to help them use products and services most effectively. Given this joint mission, the separation of these two functions is an anachronism.
First Doug looked at where users go for that information these days. Using a 2009 survey of over 700 customers he prepared this list of sources, in order of highest frequency of use:
- Knowledge base
- Company site
- Online help
- Printed documentation
Workers across the board have less time and more responsibility in today’s economy than they did even five years ago. And since people today read less in general, and the Internet is fast, thorough, and almost universally available, piles of paper documentation are clearly outmoded. Plus we face a growing legacy of unhappy history with online help, especially among novice and intermediate users. In short, documentation professionals must recognize that the customer has moved their cheese. Writers need to be part of a new solution, helping to ensure that answers to product questions come up easily on Google and that the user interface is intuitive and helpful. Collaborating with user experience professionals will unify content and design – and ultimately deliver more value to the company.
At Symantec Doug found that inviting both groups to lunch generated a productive collaboration. Looking at specific issues with a particularly troublesome product, a cross-functional team created joint solutions and strategized on how to get buy-in from other company stakeholders. Their efforts eventually saved Symantec $1 million a month in support costs.
Conclusion: the times they are a-changin’. The solution starts with reaffirming our intent – to help users get what they need to be productive. This may mean reinventing documentation jobs, so that you work even more closely with your customers and UX colleagues. It means paying attention to content in a different way, with more emphasis on crafting it in a form that works with online databases and search engines. Opportunity knocks, and documentation professionals can answer, improving their own skill sets and the reputation of their company.