Survey of UK Documentation Teams

We’ve completed interviewing the managers of UK documentation teams today. We estimate our survey covers 5% of the technical authors in the UK. This means we should have a representative sample size. The next step is to combine all the questionnaires, analyse the data and write the report. In our survey, we were particularly interested… Read more »

How valuable is product documentation?

We received this email from a Documentation Manager, yesterday: “As times are getting tougher, we’ve been challenged with the age old question of “how valuable is product documentation?” – e.g. prove your worth basically! Certainly, we know that for a product to be marketable and successful, it needs documentation to support the end user. However,… Read more »

Help files – A question of trust

Last month, Forrester Research released results from a survey on how much consumers trust different sources for information. They didn’t include online Help or knowledge bases in the survey, so we don’t know how well or badly they would have come out in the survey. They found independent (non-corporate) information were the most trustworthy sources…. Read more »

When you need Help, do you press F1 or search Google?

I was at two clients in Cambridge earlier in the week, where the conversation turned to the Internet generation and how they search for information. Both publish their user documentation on their Web site, as well publish traditional PDFs and online Help files. The first client said that they’d found from their recent customer usability… Read more »