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I am aware that this is not enough, but this is a start in a place that has
never found out anything before. I ask people here the average age of the users
and people guess. I ask education, they have no idea. These are important things
to know, just as a start.
Average age tells me about something font sizes and graphics vs words. Education
tells me reading levels. Time in job tells me experience and means I may not
need to explain some of the background concepts if they are industry wide
concepts. I am less interested right now in how they interact with the product
and more interested in who the heck these people are as a group.
Is this going to tell me everything I need? No. But it is a place to start. And
we need a place to start.
> Sharon Burton wondered: <<I have gotten a client's training group to
> agree to include a "demographics" form with the course evaluations.
> This is a huge deal for this client, as it is the first step to
> starting to find out about our documentation users.>>
>
> Beware! Demographic information is very useful when it comes to
> marketing, but much less useful when it comes to finding out what you
> need to know about how people interact with your product. Purely
> demographic information is descriptive, not prescriptive. If your goal
> is to improve, you need prescriptive information.
>
> <<I know about the basic demographic stuff like age, sex, education,
> number of years on the job, that stuff.>>
>
> The problem with all such measures is that they are at least one step
> removed from what you really need to know to make your product more
> usable. For example, does the fact that you're female and I'm male
> change how we use documentation? Not generally. We both pick up the
> book using one or two hands, turn to the index, scan to find a topic,
> flip to the desired page(s), read the relevant part of the text, then
> grab the mouse (or use a keyboard shortcut) and get to work. _These_
> are the important factors.
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