« Intellectual property, part II | Main | What is documentation? »
August 31, 2004
Customer feedback
We've probably been complaining about lack of customer feedback since tech writing became a profession.
I'll admit it's tough to tell how they did with your docs. I've been writing for years now, knowing that writers need this kind of feedback, and I don't even write back to thank people who've done a fine job, like Andreas Eckleder who wrote a GnomeToaster User's Guide that's never failed to answer my questions, or Bruce Eckel for his book on Thinking in Java.
I almost never think of sending email when I get stuck, or have a great idea. For example, I'll blog that Movable Type doesn't have good doc for handling comment spam, but I've not fed that back to the development team. (Maybe they already have too many requests for features and want to concentrate on paying customers first. But MT-Blacklist still seems to exist, and for 3.0, too.)
When we have quick customer contact, they often don't have too much to say that helps us write better product docs in general. The best situations seem to crop up during long betas, like the one we had for Directory Server 5.2, where we sort of got to know to some extent what customers were trying to accomplish, and could start real email conversations.
Posted by Mark at August 31, 2004 09:32 PM