TechWhirl (TECHWR-L) is a resource for technical writing and technical communications professionals of all experience levels and in all industries to share their experiences and acquire information.
For two decades, technical communicators have turned to TechWhirl to ask and answer questions about the always-changing world of technical communications, such as tools, skills, career paths, methodologies, and emerging industries. The TechWhirl Archives and magazine, created for, by and about technical writers, offer a wealth of knowledge to everyone with an interest in any aspect of technical communications.
Intuitive interfaces are critical. They are hard to do, because the
audience/user base/market changes constantly.
The reason intuitive interfaces are critical has to do with the way
accounting looks at reading. Reading is a cost. When the Total Cost of
Ownership (TCO) was devised, Gartner looked at negative use costs, but found
that they were off the books. There was no accounting basis for including
the cost of reading a manual. There was an accounting basis for classroom
training and the cost of the technical support call. There was no accounting
basis for desktop training or the time spent on the technical support call.
So company politics reflects this accounting bias. Training is a profit
center. Doc is a cost center.
>From the customer's perspective doc is a negative use cost, aka waste. I
know. They learned. They climbed the knowledge hill, but that is invisible
to the cost accountants running the world. An intuitive interface reduces
the cost of reading. But, again, if you look at it from the perspective of
cost accounts, the improvement is invisible.
What is not invisible is the gut-level feeling CIOs and other executives
have about the cost of software and the lie that most software-related ROI
projections have become. It hasn't helped that Gartner created another
concept called the Time To Return (TTR), a simple calculation that is mostly
wrong.
Fix the UI. Write real minimalist documentation. Save the customer money and
we might save the industry, unlikely though.
ROBOHELP X5: Featuring Word 2003 support, Content Management, Multi-Author
support, PDF and XML support and much more!
TRY IT TODAY at http://www.macromedia.com/go/techwrl
WEBWORKS FINALDRAFT: New! Document review system for Word and FrameMaker
authors. Automatic browser-based drafts with unlimited reviewers. Full
online discussions -- no Web server needed! http://www.webworks.com/techwr-l
---
You are currently subscribed to techwr-l as:
archiver -at- techwr-l -dot- com
To unsubscribe send a blank email to leave-techwr-l-obscured -at- lists -dot- raycomm -dot- com
Send administrative questions to ejray -at- raycomm -dot- com -dot- Visit http://www.raycomm.com/techwhirl/ for more resources and info.
