“Nobody reads the documentation”, is a phrase that most technical writers live with through their careers. When talking to Shrutika for my podcast – Documentors Unplugged – she relates an incident where at an interview she was asked whether she had read the documentation that came with her phone. When she said that she hadn’t the interviewer used it as proof that documentation was unnecessary.
I too have had my share of colleagues telling me my documentation is unnecessary. One went so far as to tell me that I should not write documentation for the next release just to see whether anyone would notice. It is hard to counter such arguments since there is very little analytics that proves beyond reasonable doubt that the documentation is useful.
Fortunately, I had an opportunity to test the hypothesis that nobody noticed documentation. When my company was moving from one help site to another, we decided to also change the URL to the site. It took less than an hour for my phone to be inundated with questions such as, “Where is the help site?” The uproar was so much that we needed to flip back to the old URL within an hour of retiring it. Today when someone suggests that nobody reads my documentation, I just smile.
The prominence of documentation is inversely proportional to the usability of the product. So if people are complaining about how unhelpful documentation is, it probably means that the product is pretty much unusable without the documentation.
Imagine a car manufacturer putting the steering wheel under the dashboard. As per the product team, the feature to steer the car exists and it works. If people are not able to use it or are asking questions about how to use it, it must be the documentation’s fault. They believe that better documentation will make the problem go away.
Non-intuitive products place a high unseen cost on the users – training. While it is common to have to train the employees of a new customer at the time of migrating from one system to another, it should not be that every new employee should require training. When the latter happens, it means the product is not usable to even someone who does not bring the baggage of muscle memory of another system.
Not fixing usability issues leaves the product open to replacement. The decision to move from a feature-rich, unusable product to one that may have less features, but which is easy to use is usually a simple one.
For documentation to be unnecessary, the product must be intuitive. Failing that, all the documentation in the world cannot save it.
Subtle, yet intriguing