2009-02-03 9:58 pm
3 Comments
I had this interesting IM conversation took place at work today about documentation and usability with a colleague, particularly about a document I had just sent out to my team as a reference. A couple of interesting thoughts arose out of the conversation:
- Most users seem to pick up a user manual only when they run into some issue.
- It is the user experience that counts. You can have the well-written and superbly-designed user manual for your product. But if your product is bad, a user just doesn’t care. Even after reading your excellent user manual, they still have to deal with the bad product usability.
I thought writing documents would be fun. :-(
Machine tags:
Andy C
Interesting. I have installed a lot of open source and commercial software and increasingly self-hosted PHP/MySQL based software (blogs, Wikis, Gallery, Sweetcron etc)
If I am unable to install it quickly - ideally by visiting a URL and following obvious, intuitive prompts, I may consult a README. If I am forced to go the the official documentation, simply to install the software, I probably wouldn’t bother.
If I can’t install the software, I am unlikely to use it.
2009-02-05 3:45 pm