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It Was a Dark and Stormy Night New Market, Virginia -- The great ice storm of December 2000 has forced me to hole up here for the evening. On May 15, 1864 the cadets of Virginia Military Institute gave the Union Army a sound whipping at the Battle of New Market. Shame that I've got to pull out and head home as soon as the first light thaws a path out of here. I'd like to indulge my passion for history, but I've got to be at a daughter's basketball game at 6:00 pm tomorrow [Editor's Note: Don't worry... he made it in time]. As Jerry Reed said "A long way to go and short short time to get there." Since I've been forced off the road early I'll make the best of it by catching up on a couple of product reviews I've yet to do. Doing a product review gives me heebie-jeebies the same way that the dreaded phase "Easy to Assemble Instructions" does. As strange as it may seem, software developers spend way too few resources putting their instructions together. It seems fairly simple to me - if your directions are frustrating to your users, the overall experience is going to be a less pleasurable one. As someone that reviews a fair amount of software, I've never understood how the world's best software manufacturers could produce such sadly lacking manuals. I'm talking about directions that make such fundamentally stupid mistakes as omitting steps or flat out telling you to do the wrong thing. Did they never actually try these instructions themselves before unleashing them on an unsuspecting public? In some inexplicable cases the artists are given free reign. The manuals then become canvasses for their creative minds. I remember reviewing a MetaCreations product that had more artwork than instructions per page. The artwork was beautiful indeed, but so darned distracting that I found it difficult to focus on the directions.
There Comes a Time in the Project When You Have to Shoot the Engineers In other cases you get the distinct impression that the same technically astute folks that created the software were the only ones involved in creating the manuals. Here's a hint - that doesn't work. Never. Just because a guy or gal writing 1's and 0's understands that a step in a process is so basic that it must occur doesn't mean that it's obvious to a nitwit like me. If it's part of the process, put it in there! Companies that produce smaller products such as games and plug-ins seem to do a better job than the companies that produce grand applications, such as Adobe. That's a general statement and I'm sure there are exceptions to it. But, it seems logical that with much less to document they are able to easily do a thorough review of the documentation. The instructions to War Craft II, for example, are truly a joy. Perhaps it's because it does so much that Adobe Photoshop's tutorials stand out in my head as being so frustrating. The "help" integrated into the application is something I'll never forget. I'm sure it was my imagination, but it seemed to dynamically change so that when I'd try to get back to a certain point, it was no longer as it had been. It could have been because of the red I was seeing because I could so rarely find anything I was looking for. On several occasions I had to walk away from the computer to keep from
just giving up in the middle of a product review. And the product was
truly one of my favorites ever! Here's the thing - software developers should do as the military does and have independent verifications and validations of their procedures. That is, they should get professional technical writers to independently analyze the manuals (paper or digital) so they are 100 percent usable by the, ahem, users. You know - the customer.
Electrons Don't Cut It Speaking of manuals, kill some more trees. That's right. Make sure you've got paper manuals. Digital manuals have their place, but they should not ever be the primary source of information on a product. Who in the world wants to sit locked up at their computer while reading? It's not healthy! For several reasons you should not be compelled to sit at your computer to read directions. Sometimes it's unavoidable, but that's the exception. I blew out a disk in my back because of sitting at a computer for untold hours trying to solve the mysteries of Power Point on Windows 3.1.1. The neurologist told me that the number one cause of lower disk ruptures in men is "prolonged sitting." Trying to figure out the electronic instructions for some hefty application, no doubt! So as far as I'm concerned, software vendors who don't give you documentation that you can pick up and carry to the location of your choice are in league with neurosurgeons who get wealthy performing various forms of surgery to deal with ruptured/bulging disks. Give me a book that I can go lie down with. Give me a book so I may take it with me to the in-laws. It's rank madness to think that a person should have to fire up a computer to read! What sick, sadistic minds believe for one nanosecond that a .pdf file is any substitute for paper? Again, kill more trees. Risk angering the Green Peace crowd. After all, reading electronic documents requires electricity, which requires burning oil or coal, or God forbid, a nuclear power plant. Every thing's a tradeoff. I'd rather knock off a few pine trees than have them build another Chernobyl near me. With an electronic document you can't use a highlighter, write notes,
or turn down page corners. Besides, it's too much trouble to take the
PowerBook to the bathroom. The manuals that tell users how to use the software are a part of the product. If I started giving as much weight to the documentation as I do the software itself, the average rating would probably be a 2 out of 5. Get a clue. Get a high class of professional technical writers to put together topnotch paper manuals. Everyone will benefit from it. Now, on to these product reviews.
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