Re: Good/bad docs

Subject: Re: Good/bad docs
From: Wayne Douglass <wayned -at- VERITY -dot- COM>
Date: Fri, 7 Aug 1998 10:57:02 -0700

> < snipping >
>
>> Wayne Douglass wrote:
>> >
>> > ... the Adaptec SW for burning CDs is absurdly easy to use -
>> > if you know what you want to do in the first place.
>> >
>> > Average bozos who don't know a hybrid CD from ISO 9660 might be
>> > in trouble if they don't know what they want to do.
>> >
>> > ... average bozos need some context to help them understand why
>> > they would want to burn one kind of CD rather than another.
>>
>> Wow! Does anyone else find this sequence of statements even the
>> slightest bit troubling?
>>
>> --David
> < end of snipping >

Catheryn Mason
> Yes, I do. Not to flame Wayne, but one of the challenges of
>producing documentation is to reach all levels of your audience - the
>informed user in addition to the "average" or uninformed user. User
>documentation that comes with a product should tell us what we need to
>know to make that product perform the function we bought it for - not
>more, not less.

Rather than perpetuate the rhetorical error I made in the first post, I'll
make thunderingly obvious what I thought I had implied.

Bottom line: the distributors of the CD HW/SW kit did not understand their
audience. Now that CD mastering technology has become affordable and media
very cheap, a different audience of neophytes (is that really better than
"average bozos"?) is now faced with the prospect of deciding what to do -
and the vendor didn't help them. The SW really *is* simple to use, but you
can't expect someone who is new to burning CDs to know *intuitively* the
options they should use - hence my comment on context. Once you know *what*
you want to do, doing it with the bundled SW is about as hard as boiling water.

An afterthought: I wonder if the creators the ...for Dummies books found
their choice of terms "troubling?"

--Wayne (who thinks we're all bozos on this bus)
---------------------------------------------
Wayne Douglass phone: 408-542-2139
Verity, Inc. FAX: 408-542-2040
894 Ross Road mailto:wayned -at- verity -dot- com
Sunnyvale, CA 94089 http://www.verity.com
---------------------------------------------


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