Recently I had the opportunity to travel on the Kochi metro. I trudged up the steps expecting to wait in a queue to buy my ticket, but I was pleasantly surprised when I could do it over a few WhatsApp messages. It took the better part of three decades for the ticketing process to reach this point. The first step was when computers appeared at the ticketing counters. You still had to queue up and pay cash. Then, almost a decade later, came the UPI revolution. But you still queued up to get your ticket. Another half decade passed before you could buy the ticket without going to the ticket counter. I understand that this feature is now available on all the metro systems in India.
Personal computers began to pop up on desks in the late 1980s. The buzzword was computerization. Everyone wanted to computerize everything. But none of the promised benefits were showing up. This led to the famous Robert Solow quip.
“You can see the computer age everywhere but in the productivity statistics.”
The sluggish progress was not new. We had seen it earlier in the 1800s after Edison started selling electricity. Although everyone was electrifying their factories, productivity was going nowhere in a hurry. The reason? The steam age was still around. We were still using factory buildings and machinery designed to run on steam. Just as the it took a generation of machinery and buildings to pass into history before the benefits of electrification were seen, so too with the computer age.
A similar story is unfolding with product documentation.
Much of the documentation we churn out today is reminiscent of the kind that came with machines from three or four decades ago – mostly aimed at procedures and troubleshooting. As the UX/UI disciplines mature, we should be doing less procedure documentation and focusing our efforts on creating documentation that enables users to use the products effectively. This means getting users to unlearn the old ways and learn how to do things more efficiently using the capabilities of the software.
Surprisingly, a good example of this kind of documentation is the one that came with my microwave. After a brief section on how to use the microwave and outlining the various features, the manual actually focuses on how you can cook more effectively using the microwave.
Generative AI (GAI) will enable this approach to documentation. As we give access to more documents to the GAI bots, they will learn many things from internal documentation. For instance, access to JIRA tickets will inform the bots about many nuances of using a feature. Things such as whether the sure should enable any settings to use the feature or whether access to a feature is controlled by a role permission. This will require product managers to write detailed product specs. It needs development teams to document minute details in the feature ticket. QA teams must log every issue, no matter how small, into the tickets. Responses to these issues must also be on the ticket. The richer the ticket, the better chance the GAI bot has of guiding the user on how to use the feature.
This move to richer content within tickets will change the role of the product documenter. It will require us to think more like product managers and explore the various scenarios that a feature opens up for the customer. We must approach documentation from the perspective of “how can we help customers be more efficient” rather than the current approach which is “how does the customer complete a particular process”.
This will also lead to a narrowing of the talent pool. Recruiting managers will demand demonstrated skills in exploring products from the perspective of the customer. They will also want demonstrated skills in being able to understand the intricacies of an industry so we can write for the end user.
John F. Kennedy said these words in a different context, but it holds true here.
“All this will not be finished in the first one hundred days. Nor will it be finished in the first one thousand days, not in the life of this Administration [our careers], nor even perhaps in our lifetime on this planet. But let us begin.”
We need a whole generation of people and processes to pass into history before the benefits of computerization can be seen.
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