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This forum is for the discussion of the business and craft of writing help. For example writing style, choices of HTML Help or WinHelp or browser-based and so on...

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CLse
Posts: 33
Joined: Tue Dec 18, 2007 2:15 pm

User profiles

Unread post by CLse »

Do you really know, who are the users of your product, and can they see how your product fits together?

One of the first things you learn as a technical writer, in fact, any writer be it fiction, Romance, whatever, understand your target audience needs and expectations. Like Indiana Jones in Raiders of Lost Ark, user profiles, are the holy grail of top-level end user help!

From the user's perspective, they just want help system that makes sense to them, integrated within the application whereby the information fits seamlessly like a glove that covers every inch of their problem within 30 seconds.

I would suggest the majority of us do not spend that much time user profiling the target audience, yes, of course we'd like to, however, due to today's web-based three clicks and I am off mentality, the majority of Tech writers yield to the pressure of project deadlines.

As a result, we all tend to have a loose idea of are users, due to the fact that we never actually get to see or for that matter, spending great deal of time with the user.
The vast majority of the time, fragments of information is foraged from sales, marketing and support. If you ask a support engineer, what he thinks a typical user is, the next support engineer you interview will tell you something different.

What we end up with is a fragmented user profile based on the common denominator of information obtained from the internal sources.

My question is:
If the company is aware that good user documentation can drive down support costs, and enhance the company image. Why is that most companies spend little or no time actually focusing on what the user really does and document it.

Do you spend enough time, how do you tackle the start of a project and how much time do you devote to user profiling?

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Clse
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