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> Each railroad wants us to go thru their 1 day safety training to spend an
> hour
> on their site watching their people install or maintain our equipment. You
> can
> imagine the response to spending a day training for an hour in the field.
I can imagine MY response, which would be "COOL"! Then you would
definitely know what your users go through! Why can't you do this?
> The idea that we should find out about our users is a brand new one here,
> literally. Like so many places, our engineers "know" who our users are -
> they're
> just like us! So write docs the product engineers like and that will meet
> our
> users needs. Except every place I have ever heard that, it turned out to
> be not
> true. I suspect it to be the case here and want to find out just who these
> users
> are.
Actually, at my previous job the engineers spent more time with the users
than I did, or than the customer service folks did (the customer service
folks were scary ignorant sometimes). The way the engineers tested
required them to interact with users on the users' turf. So I learned a
lot from the engineers. I would think that what your customers want you to
do would be the same kind of thing--require you to interact with the users
on their turf--and would be excellent experience and a great way to get
inside their heads.
Nora
--
Nora
nora -at- helloworld -dot- sh
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