Why don’t technical writers (or customers) read?
Come on, you’ve seen it yourself. Give a technical writer a new product or a gadget, they open the box, toss the manual and then try on their own to figure out how it works. So why spend money to write the manual in the first place? And how can it be that technical writers have so little respect for their own line of work?
A few weeks ago, I had the opportunity to run a conference attended by 50 technical writers from around the country. They write for a variety of fields—everything from mobile devices to the most technical HW appliances on the planet. To my amazement, the vast majority sheepishly admitted to not even reading the release notes for the software product they all use for writing and publishing their documentation. (100% of them did not bother to read the manual!)
So, the question remains—why don’t we read anymore?
I think the main answer is that we skim. In reality, we learn to skim from a very young age. Case in point: The other day, I took my 2.5 year old twins out with me in the car. We parked near a sign that read “No Parking”. One of my daughters excitedly said, “Mommy, look! They wrote my name on the wall!”. “No” starts with the first letter of her first name, and though I didn’t teach her explicitly, she has already learned to skim words for letters and then make assumptions.
We communicate with a keyboard these days and we have less patience and time for every task. Extensive use of Chat and SMS means that we now create new and intuitive ways to share information with people as fast as possible. Texting is a whole new form of slang that is making inroads everywhere, especially in information and user interface design. Gone (or bankrupt) are the websites and applications that required heavy reading to get the information you were looking for. Successful are those sites and apps where navigation is intuitive and user workflow is relatively easy to learn and scale up.
So while I might peruse a manual if there is no other option, I am more inclined to turn to a user assistance group or search the product knowledge base or help file for the concept I need to find or the problem I need to solve. Your users are doing the exact same thing.
My next question should be obvious—do you have a technical writing solution in place that is giving your users the information they need and want in a format that works for them? Or, are you providing the same PDF and CHM file from 5 or 10 years ago and just hoping that is enough? Every company is looking for differentiators for their product over the competition. Documentation (I like to think of it more as product knowledge sharing) can be a hindrance or a help—depending on how well you achieve it. I wouldn’t spend thousands of dollars on a really fancy PDF template (I think that is a waste of cash), but I would spend money surveying your potential customers to determine how they like to get information. Then you can figure out how to deliver it to them in a way that bridges between the product engineer and the end user. Your technical writing solution should also not be one-way traffic—but we’ll talk about that more next time.
If you skimmed, my main point was that creative documentation outputs/products can be the deciding factor when selling your product and that is where I would be spending my documentation budget in 2010.
Feel free to call me to further discuss this concept for your specific organization.
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You still get nerds like me, who ALWAYS read the instructions and then have to explain to everybody else what to do!
But I understand what you mean, people simply do not have time or want to make time to read instruction manuals from beginning to end. Maybe the user can download an instruction file unto their cell, laptop or e-book reader and browse through it by pressing icons. It would be really cool if the instuctions can be listened to, like talking to IT on the phone.
A bit futuristic I know, but still a good idea.
Marina Shemesh
An interesting article asking similar questions was posted on the WashingtonPost's site (here).
It doesn't directly address us technical writers but it's about the phenomenon in general and makes some good points. Worth a read.
Few still read since I used to get "bug reports" on documentation :-)
Since we are living in an "instant world" and since interfaces are more and more intuitive you expect to understand everything on the fly. Nevertheless, it is still required to open documentation to get an initial overview, when you are stuck (RTFM is still valid...) or to understand things in depth. We should adapt documentation to new trends but not discard completely.
Happy 2010!!!
Since technology is changing so rapidly, our work is trashed within 2 to 3 years. With all due respect, how important could our information delivery be?
When you have to configure complex devices, instructions, in any multimedia format, provide important information.
Although many of us our delivering information about products that may be boring as ever, we have to get the global picture and think that our products may be improving productivity and making our world a better place. For example, the speed of a switch may help transfer medical results faster to save lives, or tranmit data much more effectively to save someone somewhere.
Kudos to the content writers that help people figure out how to use the not so intuitve products on today's marketplace, and are making the world a better place.
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