Re: Should I document this feature?

["Meryl R. Cohen" <merylster -at- gmail -dot- com>]

My call would be to speak to your software dev folks. If users shouldn't use
these menu items unless they are talking with tech support then they should
not be visible and live in the menu. They should require the user to enter a
weird keyboard combination (or something else you can't do by accident)
provided by tech support before the menu items show up.

Hopefully you work in the kind of company where doc people are allowed to
comment on software UI issues.

Meryl

On Fri, Aug 6, 2010 at 4:36 PM, Keith Hood <klhra -at- yahoo -dot- com> wrote:

> Document everything at the same level of granularity. Because just as sure
> as you don't, someone will find himself needing to do it, and then he will
> go "Why the ! -at- #$ didn't you tell me?"  Or if you document these things but
> more briefly than other things, he'll complain that you aren't giving him
> enough information.  He may be wrong, but he'll complain anyway, and then
> you have a CRM problem.
>
> Since these are not everyday functions, you should make that plain in the
> writeups about them, and separate them from the rest of the documentation.
> Put them in a separate chapter of the book, or in an "Advanced Functions"
> book in the help system menu, or something like that.
>
>
> --- On Fri, 8/6/10, Joe Weinmunson <litlfrog -at- gmail -dot- com> wrote:
>
> From: Joe Weinmunson <litlfrog -at- gmail -dot- com>
> Subject: Should I document this feature?
> To: techwr-l -at- lists -dot- techwr-l -dot- com
> Date: Friday, August 6, 2010, 10:22 AM
>
> At startup, our program looks for a license file in the application
> directory. That license controls what features of the program are
> activated for the user and how many users can access the program at
> the same time. There are three menu functions that involve the
> license: updating, reading license information, and copying a license
> from one file to another. However, I can't think of any situation
> where the end user can or should be using those menu functions if
> they're not on the phone with tech support anyway. Should I leave
> those commands out of the documentation completely? Explain what each
> one does? Or take some kind of middle road? Thanks.
>
> --
> Joe Weinmunson
>
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