|
Vesa Purho
Development Manager, Nokia
A lot has been written about how important it is to know the
users of your products so that you can provide information
products that match their needs. Naturally, writers should
know the product they are documenting so that they know what
they are talking about when they discuss the product with
subject-matter experts (SMEs). They must be able to ask the
right questions and get the right answers. In addition, to
provide excellent information products, writers need to know
their users' business.
Why should we know something about our users' business? When
we think, if we think, that information products should add
value to the users, we need to answer the question: how do
they add value? From the user's point of view, good grammar,
superb spelling, and correct content are not really
value-adding factors. They are hygiene factors, that is,
they have to be there or the users will be unhappy, but do
they add extra value if you make them even better?
The information products really add value if they help the
users to perform their work more effectively. Optimally, the
product should be so easy to use so that information
products are not needed in the basic use of the product.
Naturally, when something goes wrong, "information
products" are valuable to help in recovering from the
situation. Information products add value also by showing
how the product can best be used to run the user's business.
You don't have to write a student book on the subject
matter, but you could add value to the users by showing some
tips and advice on their particular situation. For example,
if a procedure describes how to modify the configuration
files, instead of saying "The following procedure describes
how to use the GUI for modifying the configuration files,"
you could describe the purpose of modifying the
configuration files and in what kind of situations the user
should modify them. To provide this kind of information, you
must know something about the business and related
technologies. You also have to take the user profiles into
account, knowing what a particular user group already knows
so that you don't provide detailed information on something
that they know by education or experience.
User and task analysis in their basic form reveal what the
users do and how they do it, but to really add value, you
should also know why they do what they do. To be able to
provide that kind of information, you should know something
about the business in which the product is used. All this is
related to the strategic position of information products
for a specific product. If information products are not
meant to add value, then they only provide the basics, but
if you are competing by adding value, as opposed to
competing with price, information products can be key
players in providing that added value.
This article is the personal opinion of the author and does
not necessarily reflect the opinion or practice of Nokia.
|
