(old post from Nov. 5, 2006, but I need this link!)
Anyone interested in user experience should bookmark Creating Passionate Users, a great UI blog.
Then, read the post, Why Marketing Should Make the User Manuals. (At the very least, look at this oh-so-true graphic illustration.)
Why do so many companies treat potential users so much better than existing users? Think about it. The brochure is a thing of beauty, while the user manual is a thing of boredom. The brochure gets the big budget while the manual gets the big index. What if we stopped making the docs we give away for free SO much nicer than the ones the user paid for?
What if, instead of seducing potential users to buy, we seduced existing users to learn?
Now, you’re dead wrong if you think I’m lobbying for the manual/documentation piece to move into the marketing stack. I’m not a technical writer and have no plans to incorporate that skill set into my existing one.
And, I think the notion becomes specious if we don’t acknowledge that, if you don’t seduce potential users at some point, they never become the existing users. You don’t have anyone to teach if not for the initial pitching of woo.
Still, the crux of this message is a valuable one. I’m a slavering fan of continual customer marketing — the idea that developing and maintaining customer relationships is a never-ending process, and that a company needs to care about it from the ground up, not just in lofty philosophical discussion at executive retreats.
But “Why Marketing Should Make the User Manuals” argues something in addition: let’s use compelling training materials to make our end users passionate about learning our product, which will then turn them into net promoters… who are quick to evangelize our software and people to others.
By using marketing techniques to glam up our user docs, we can turn our users into a marketing tool. How meta is that?
I was waaaaay too drunk to respond to this last night, but I have some really strong feelings on this. I’ve struggled with this issue for several years now and I’ve seen it emphatically not work when the docs team falls organizationally under Engineering because there is little accountability and sense of user needs.
I think that, in many organizations, placing docs under Marketing is a good idea but not a feasible. Product Marketing and Product Management are not necessarily the same department and/or role in most organizations, so it’s — in theory — correct to say that Product Management should be responsible for the documentation and manuals. The reality is that Product Management is responsible for everything that ships with the software, release management, requirements, etc. Product Marketing is more often responsible for coordination and communication with analysts (although this is gray area with Product Management), data sheets/spec sheets and other collateral and industry and competitive research and sales team support.
In an ideal world, this is done not by asking the Product Managers or Marketing team to actually write the docs — documentation is not their core competency. Instead, the documentation team should fall, organizationally, under one of those two teams. The result of this is that the team understands the goals and values of Product Management/Product Marketing, the user scenarios under which users access documentation and, perhaps most importantly, the costs (tangible and intangible) of poorly designed documentation.
Oh, PS: I love the blog you referenced. It’s on my professional reading list as well.
“Instead, the documentation team should fall, organizationally, under one of those two teams.”
Aha, but now you are asking for separate departments to work together! asking for managers to be sensitive to and respectful of the driving motivations behind different business goals!
I’m not saying it can’t work, but I do believe that even in 2007, most senior management teams perceive marketing to be smoke and mirrors. I just got back from a conference that had an entire session on how to pitch marketing projects and budgets to CEOs who think that marketing is a touchy-feely, made up thing, a department that a company has strictly Because It’s Supposed To, but which doesn’t actually add value to the organization.
And I think it’s especially challenging for the analytical minds that usually inhabit tech space to properly value the soft stuff.
I’m now getting too meta and away from the point of my post… but, I agree that there needs to be a joint effort. I just think (wryly) that it’s easier for Kathy Sierra to throw the idea out and let the world ponder it, than it is for the rest of us to actually implement it.
As a tech writer, every time Marketing has become involved in my user documentation, their attempts have made manuals and online help more confusing and less clear. Procedures do not need to be cluttered up with product pitches. When I am trying to figure out how to get started with a product, or how to perform a task, I don’t want to deal with a lot of pretty glossy photos. I want to find the info I need, quickly (thus, an index). I agree that there are ways to make product documentation more appealing to users, but turning them into marketing materials, with their euphemistic text and unnecessary graphics, sounds like the wrong way to do it.