DarrenBarefoot.com

Your interpretation of her post was dramatically different than my own. I didn’t take her post to mean that she was hoping the marketing big-guns would start putting together the user manuals to better spin the product, but to use design and copywriting skills to better educate the customer to help make them a poweruser, and eventually an evagelist.

Great design skills are useful for far more than just marketing.

[Reply]

Darren,

Thank you for your reply. I wish you could meet the marketers I have had the pleasure to work with. We take great pride in telling the truth 100 percent of the time, as clearly and as concisely as we can. Every prefession has bad actors, and Marketing is no exception.

Technical writers are, as you say, more than capable of performing the job. I wonder, however, how many high-tech businesses employ them. (The one I worked for did not and would not in order to cut costs.) I have two shelves full of user manuals that are dull, overly wordy and totally lacking in layout that would make them easier to read.

Sort of makes one wonder how many high-tech businesses operate without writers and graphic designers.

[Reply]

Lewis: Are you saying that you and your colleagues never “obfuscate, exaggerate, denigrate and spin”? That seems unlikely, given the extent of deception practiced in the industry. Don’t believe me? Just go visit PRWeb.com.

Regardless, whether marketers lie is tangential to my point: the people who sell the things shouldn’t explain how they work.

[Reply]

I think that the logic employed is something like this:

Marketers care about customers. Manuals are for customers. Therefore Marketers should write manuals.

The fallacy should be easy to spot. Try this one on:

Socrates is a writer. Socrates is a marketer. All marketers are Socr^H^H^H^Hwriters.

[Reply]

Darren, you made a lot of great points, but I think most manuals are anything but page-turners. If users aren’t turning the pages, they aren’t learning. No matter how motivated users may be on why they SHOULD read the manual, for a variety of reasons, they just… don’t. Most of those reasons can be fixed, but not by expecting users to take responsibility and RTFM.

Instructional designers know that learning requires motivation, but most traditional instructional design models do a terrible job of specifying exactly how that motivation is supposed to happen (performance objectives are not enough). Most technical writing–regardless of how clear and appropriate–does not address the main problem of making the content *compelling*. We know how to appeal to the reader’s logical mind, but not how to connect with their legacy brain, and for that… we need to add in those other skills that many marketers and advertisers and good designers have… the ability to reach past the brain’s crap filter, catch their interest, and most importantly–get them to keep turning the pages!

Most (obviously not all) manuals are not engaging the reader’s brain. That’s a problem, and if marketers can *help* make the actual learning content more compelling, that would be a big step forward. I agree that this has nothing to do with motivating users on why the PRODUCT is good (you’re right, that’s no longer an issue). This is about motivating them on why LEARNING MORE is good. It’s about using the skills that help encourage someone to pick up and read a brochure, and apply them to encourage users to pick up and read the manual (or at least the getting started,learning, and other non-reference parts).

As for your BEA example, I actually think BOTH of those pargraphs suck. True, the second one does a better, more accurate job of describing what the product does, but neither of these are the least bit compelling. And I haven’t even talked about memorability… many marketers and advertisers have a lot to teach the rest of us (tech writers, like me) about making things memorable and let’s face it–the clearest tech manual in the world loses effectiveness if the reader has to keep reading the same parts because it didn’t “stick” the first time.

Anyway, I do think you added a great deal to this conversation, and made me realize a ton of places where my post was weak or said something I didn’t intend. And you got us all to think more deeply. YOU have the skills to make things compelling, Darren. If more people writing tech manuals had your ability to be engaging, there’d be a lot more happy users (and a lot more tech support folks out looking for jobs) ; )

[Reply]

I understood Kathy’s article in the context of a previous one: Are your users stuck in “P” mode, in which she argued that most manuals focus on the wrong thing.

Most manuals focus on how to operate the tool … not on how to achieve what you bought the tool for. For example, the high-end digital camera that you bought tells you all about how to set shutter speed and focal length … and not a word about why you would actually want to do that, when you will want to adjust those parameters, and what effect it will have on your photos.

In other words, the manual is about the camera, not photography. It’s about the product, not the activity.

That’s the context in which I understand her saying: the amount of energy and resources that go into marketing a product should also go into explaining the use of the product.

That just makes sense.

And that’s where marketing can help … because marketing is always (or should always) be focused on the reasons why a person would buy a particular product.

More details here:
http://www.sparkplug9.com/bizhack/index.php/2006/08/30/marketing-and-the-manuals/

[Reply]

Darren

A lot of this debate centres around a misunderstanding of the term marketing and your focus on practices that Kathy and I and other commenters would describe as bad promotion. Collectively we are talking about manuals being more effective and do not see the route to this as merely handing them over to the lame marketing practitioners to whom you refer.

I’d be interested in your reaction to an attempt at clarification that I made some time ago

http://makemarketinghistory.blogspot.com/2006/08/geek-marketing-101_115529822564302037.html

John

P.S. Re BEA manual, if I had bought the product I would hope that I already knew what it did in general terms at least.

[Reply]

It’s not that the “ideas” of marketing and technical writing suck, it’s the actual practice of those ideas. Marketing is supposed to be about connecting people with products or services. It is an educational process designed to help the learner decide if the product will give them what they are looking for. Just looking at a product may not give you any idea if it will provide what you are really looking for. The person may not even KNOW what they are really looking for. The marketing process (i.e. copy) should build trust and say what benefits the product really provides. That is the real purpose of marketing. Of course, this rarely occurs.

The help manual is also an educational process. It continues the marketing process. Now that you know what benefits you want… how do you get them? We tend to think in terms of those benefits. For example, I have written a help manual for a point–of-sales program. I also do the training for that program, so I get a feel for what the user is looking for in the help manual. One benefit they want from the program is the ability to save money by using less labor. What features of the program allow that? How do they get to them? How do they use them? I have had to re-write large portions of the manual to accomodate this way of thinking.

I guess what I am trying to say is that both marketing and technical writing should connect the user with the benefits of the product or service. That is really what they want. They both (should) require a lot of knowledge about the product. Real marketers and real technical writers should not be that different from each other. I actually perform both functions where I work and have to put myself in only a slightly different frame of mind for each function. It is a great perspective and they both compliment each other well.

[Reply]

Darren,

I think you have mis understood Kathy’s point.

Does the user manual need to look awful to say to the world that it is the user manual?

Can it not look good, Can it not feel good to make a user start to look into it and read into it?

Only when you give an attractive package , a customer will think of looking at what is inside the package.

The ugly look in itself is a put off for me even though a particular manual is superbly written and illustrated.

Unfortunately not everyone in the world is filled with geeks and techies…The majority are normal people who have normal aspirations.

Sometimes taking the trouble to present something is a better, useful manner will only help the end user from scratching his head.

[Reply]

“Have the technical folks write it for accuracy then hand off to marketing AND your Learning & Performance group to ensure that even installing, setting up and/or learning how to use your product is just as much fun as you said it would be before I bought it.”

How about running the manual by some of your customers as well? Generally speaking, manuals can be somewhat confusing to some folks because of technical writers & perhaps this could be mitigated by asking users of the product to comment on it (streamlining the way the content is structured).

A secondary issue with manuals is that they generally include *everything* that you need to know about the product. A Top 5-10 list at the front of many manuals would probably increase the enjoyment of many products immensely & reduce service contacts by customers.

[Reply]

I’ve worked in all of these areas, and they differ considerably. Engineers and programmers must train themselves to think like machines, so they are often bad at explaining how things work to people. Marketers highlight the good, sell the benefit, tell the story, and usually hide the bad. Technical writers explain the background and outline the process. They are all different tasks, and usually require different skills. User interface or interaction designers are another class, requiring both technical skill and human understanding that prevents them from working as engineers, at least on projects where they work on user interface.

I think Kathy’s fundamental point about making instructions and manuals compelling is a good one, although ideally, as much of the product should be self-discoverable as possible. Manuals should tell stories. But they also need to work as references for people who want to figure out a specific thing. Striking a good balance there is hard.

Perhaps a perfect manual would be one so interesting it would be its own marketing material. Griffin’s old manual for Final Vinyl 1.0 used to do that, with its funky ’60s-inspired colour scheme and flower patterns, spunky tone, and easy flow. But that’s simple software, and now version 2.0 has a still-entertaining but much less groovy design. Pity.

[Reply]

I most agree with Derek K Miller, marketing, documentation, and engineering are all separate fields and each has its qualities (in the ideal case). What I want to add is that they should really be working together, not only to harmonize the user experience, but also to cross-pollinate ideas and techniques. I think this was Kathy’s original idea: add the visual appeal used by marketing to improve the user docs. Unfortunately, the larger the corporation, the less likely that various groups speak to each other.

I also strongly believe that “as much of the product should be self-discoverable as possible.” Hopefully, in Web 3.0, we won’t need any manuals, because “it’ll just work.” Mass-consumer cameras won’t need an aperture setting, and you won’t need a course on photography because there will be a “depth of field setting” allowing you to select “subject only in focus” or “all in focus” across all other modes.

However, I believe the whole discussion is moot based on resource allocation (in other words, the real world of corporate struggles). It really boils down to customers not being willing to pay for nice looking docs (not because they don’t want them, but because they were led to believe the product would be easier to use and not require extensive research). I am a tech writer, and I have seen no trend towards either better docs or better products. I believe marketing is favored in corporations because it is composed of ambitious people who know how to promote themselves.

[Reply]

[...] Darren Barefoot, a prominent Vancouver blogger and “technologist”, recently commented on the difference between a technical writer and one that works in the marketing department. His was a response to a post by another commentator (out there in the wide world of the interweb) who stated that she would like to see more marketing elements and funding put into the making of user manuals. Instruction booklets are too dry, she said. They’re not compelling enough, she went on. Darren shot her down, and I’m not his side on this one. [...]

[...] Aaron and I will be appearing on a DocTrain panel in May), on the other hand, disagrees. This older post explains at length why documentation should be kept out of the hands of the marketing [...]