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Vesa Purho
Development Manager, Nokia
In the beginning of April, I moved back to management after
being in a research position for almost three years. At
first, I had mixed feelings because I thought the change in
position meant that I would no longer be working that much
with customer documentation issues, a subject I feel
somewhat attached to after doing research on it for a few
years. But there I was, managing a small group of people
responsible for giving support to the users of our
documentation tools.
I had time to do some reading. I read
Simplicity:
The New Competitive Advantage in a World of More, Better, Faster
(Perseus, 2001) by Bill Jensen,
Content
Management for Dynamic Web Delivery (Wiley, 2002) by JoAnn Hackos, and
Don't
Make Me Think: A Common Sense Approach to Web Usability
(Que, 2000) by Steve Krug. Suddenly, well actually gradually
because it was not like a lightning strike, I started seeing
things differently. We are supporting the users of our
documentation tools and methods, which means that we have
some guidance documents (user manuals), our documentation
info bank (troubleshooting information), and Web pages that
give general information about our tools and standards. We
even have a help desk mail address and phone number
(technical support). So, my group actually is like a
customer documentation group; our customers just happen to
be the writers, coordinators, project managers, and others
that are involved in creating the customer documents.
One thing I missed when doing the research work was that I
was only remotely in control of implementing any of the
ideas I studied. All I could do was recommend that certain
practices be adopted and give consultation when somebody
needed guidance in adopting them. In this new position,
though, I can really implement all the ideas, and what's
even better than implementing ideas in our customer
documentation, is that I have reasonably easy access to my
users. I can easily do user studies and usability
evaluations. And I can see the effects of my actions in the
activity of our help desk operations.
Now I have plans for creating an information model that
covers the needs of our user community. We will see if we
can arrange the information so that the users can find it
more efficiently. For that purpose, I will use the practices
described in JoAnn Hackos's book. I'm also hoping to adopt
some of the simplicity and clarity principles presented in
Bill Jensen's book to make the work in our group more
efficient. When designing the intranet services, the
usability advice from Steve Krug is valuable.
If you are in a similar position, responsible for supporting
your technical documentation personnel, or any other
personnel for that matter, I think it is very beneficial to
think about them as the users you support and adopt the good
principles we have created in the customer documentation
field. In following best practices, you will help your
customers concentrate on their work by providing the
information they need to perform their technology tasks
easily.
This article is the personal opinion of the author and does
not necessarily reflect the opinion or practice of Nokia.
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