87% of statistics are made up on the spot
Original article date: June 2002
They used to say that 75% of UK VCRs still had 00:00 flashinginstead of the correct set time. As Vic Reeves so rightly points out, 87% of statistics are made up on the spot, but I think we’d all agree that most technology out there is massively under-used. A classic example is Microsoft Office, whereby the majority of users now on Office XP could barely claim to have used more 20% of the ’special’ features of Office 97.
It’s interesting to compare off the shelf equipment with special purpose equipment in this respect. You might imagine that a special purpose machine wouldn’t be packed with features no one needs, since added features cost money, and the idea of a bespoke is that meets the spec and no more. Since a special purpose project costs more, you might expect that it would have a budget that would support a bit of genuine training. And as the equipment is targeted at a particular area in the customer’s organisation, you’d expect it to be used by a small number of people, so it should be possible to train them all to use every bit of it.
On the other hand, the user manuals and training aids supplied with a standard product can be amortised over a lot more units than the ones that are put together by a typical “special projects” company, and a product company (with its sizeable marketing department) probably has access to more suitable tools for preparing such literature or training aids.
So here’s a question: is a typical bespoke machine, in general, used by better trained staff than a standard machine?
I think there is a feeling across high and low volume products that manuals are mostly of little use to the people who need them. This is because, in general, the user does not read the manual from cover to cover before starting, but expects to use it as a reference text when he cannot figure things out any other way or when something goes wrong.
So should the ideal manual be written entirely as a trouble shooting guide? Probably not, but it should certainly be searchable. A hypertext format, which includes a search engine is almost essential and this leaves very few alternatives for how you implement it. It would need special dedicated program that the user installs which IS the manual (with accompanying CD), a Windows help file, a Word document with significant inbuilt programming, and a selection of linked HTML pages with Java applets to provide the search functionality.
The great thing about the last of these choices is that it can be implemented on a CD and be totally platform independent, and it can also be implemented (with no changes) as an actual web page.
But is the CD really worth giving out at all? Could we publish all manuals only on the web instead? And I don’t mean as downloadable PDFs you print out – I mean things you have to read online.
Apart from the cost savings, the advantage for the supplier is that it allows access to manuals to be tracked. It is then possible to see which aspects of the manual are and are not being used (or which need improving). It would also possible to build a ‘trouble shooting flow chart’ implemented as a series of web page questions, leading ultimately to an “if all else fails” form that generates an email to the supplier.
June 2002