Last week we purchased and received an Asus eee pc 900. Its popularity illustrates the dilemma manufacturers will face in the future, with regard to their user documentation/user assistance.
Background
The eee pc is a ultra portable laptop, which costs roughly a fifth of the price of an Apple Airbook or a Sony Vaio.
It runs on Linux and it was originally designed for children, which explains why it is so cheap. It has a simple interface that provides links to the key software but restricts you from doing much else.
The consequence
Its low cost, low weight and size means the eee pc is popular outside its target audience. The consequence of which is Asus now has a group of users who want to do more with the laptop than was originally intended. They want to add more software and access the Linux desktop hiding underneath.
The manual supplied provides basic, but usable, information on how to use the laptop as originally designed. It doesn’t provide any more detail than that. So, as a consequence, a number of Web sites have developed, such as eeeuser.com, which tell users how to access the advanced features.
The problem for Asus is they now have a group of users making modifications to their laptop, based on completely unofficial information. Users have to trust this information is correct – hoping it won’t trash their machine.
The dilemma
Here’s the dilemma:
Should Asus distance itself from this information? They might miss out on sales to business users if they do.
Should Asus let its documentation be “remixed” – supplemented with additional, more geeky information from users? The information might be incorrect.
Should Asus moderate this user information in someway? They might end up with more support calls if they do.
So what should they do?
They should embrace those websites, and either setup a Wiki for everyone to contribute to, or figure out a way to work with those websites.
The future of documentation for most products will start to be driven out to such areas of user-generated content. I’d much rather be part of that discussion (as a company and as a professional) than be excluded.
Asus should embrace these websites but also be aware of the issues you bring up. This example offers a great case study.
OLPC has a similar conundrum with the OLPCnews.com site and forums run by a fan. His heart is in the right place, but because that fan’s focus is more on the use of machines by the Give1Get1 crowd than OLPC’s original mission to deliver laptops to underdeveloped countries, there is sometimes sense of controversy where they may not have been one if the focus was laser-tight.
Other user content is found on the MAKE magazine blog, which is also very helpful to XO owners, but tends towards the US-based use, not the children originally targeted for the XO.
I think most US-based XO users understand that all bets are off for support, though, when you start down a hack path. The warranty on the XO is only 30 days, after all. I don’t know what support ramifications and risks people who own the Asus eee take when they access the Linux underneath. It may be low risk.
What’s interesting when you start to analyze the offered content is the intersection of users who are not quite geeky enough to understand seriously glossed-over instructions and instead want step-by-step “recipes” for tasks for their very specific hardware setup. An example of what I mean by this “recipe” approach is the difference between instructions that tell you step by step exactly how to get your AT&T wireless router working with your XO laptop, which involves knowing enough conceptual information to understand that you have to transform the passcode to Hex, and then understanding how to transform the passcode to Hex. Or even knowing what to do when instructions say “log in as root.” There’s a vast canyon of conceptual knowledge to be bridged and companies just cannot bridge it all the time any longer, I believe.
Just one other observation. Game companies have already been working with these kinds of wikis, for years in some cases, and asked the question, should we host the wiki or should we step back and let the community run it? In all but one case, they are stepping back, keeping an eye on the wiki but not moderating, rather, letting the community moderate itself. This has been wildly successful when measuring attention paid to the game and the popularity of the end-user documentation for strategy. No money was lost on strategy guides, essentially, because the game strategy updated faster on the wiki than print could keep up with.
As I quoted from some panelists from “Gamers are adopting the wiki way” at SXSWi this year, “People devoting time to their product is more valuable than money because it makes the developers motivated and excited – passion.”
This passion is the new measure of the success of a product.
I also strongly recommend anyone who has real concerns about losing money or business due to wiki-based docs or docs that don’t quite meet their intended business goals to read Chris Anderson’s Wired article, Free! Why $0.00 Is the Future of Business at http://www.wired.com/techbiz/it/magazine/16-03/ff_free.
Would love to hear your thoughts on doc remix and its appropriateness, since you never really answered the questions yourself! 🙂
Great comments Anne, particularly as the eee pc is competing partially with the One Laptop Per Child (OPLC) XO computer (which isn’t yet available in the UK).
I should clarify what I meant by Right to Remix. In the Web 2.0 world, Right to Remix means the right to take data from one site and use it elsewhere. Strictly speaking, in a documentation context, this would mean giving people the ability to republish and modify your documentation. I think the Right to Remix concept can be broadened when we consider documentation. It can also cover the right to comment and supplement official user documentation.
Maybe “democratisation of user documents” might be a better phrase. This, of course, is only likely to happen where you have a large user base, such as with mass consumer products.
I think if a wiki is created, it should be made clear what is official and what is unofficial information. You may also want to distinguish what has been edited (but not written) by the organisation. This is possible on some wiki platforms. Once this is done, then I think Right to Remix is “a good thing”, and there’s a case for having platforms like wikis overseen by the organisation.
I doubt wikis will replace online Help until they offer similar usability features. So this brings into play the issue of single sourcing. This is why DITA wikis, MadCap Flare’s Web 2.0 features and Author-it’s Live! module should be watched with interest.