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Posts Tagged ‘documentation’

The doQer Help Section: Eating Our Own Dog Food

Monday, July 13th, 2009

In parallel with the private beta testing that doQer is undergoing at the moment, we’re drafting out the “Help” text that will appear on the site to guide our users.

Of course, since doQer’s purpose is to host user manuals, all of the “Help” text will itself be contained in a user manual hosted on doQer. We’re eating our own dog food.

Making the manuals has actually been a very instructive process for us. As a developer it can be hard to put yourself in the shoes of the user, but using your own product for the purpose it’s indended, not just in a test scenario but on a real life project, really helps to identify areas for improvement.

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The Popular Manuals

Thursday, June 4th, 2009

User Manual

We want to upload a few existing user manuals to doQer, for products that are already on the market, so that we can begin showcasing the application’s capabilities.

It seemed a good idea to figure out which manuals people use most, so I did a quick Google search for a list of the most popular manuals. Unfortunately, such a list doesn’t seem to exist online (I guess not everyone is as obsessed with user manuals as we are here a doQer!).

A different approach was required. It seems to make sense to assume that the popular manuals would more or less correlate to top selling consumer electronic products, so I followed that path by looking at the most sold products from online shops and websites like Amazon.com, Shopper.com, and PriceGrabber.com. Much easier to find!

The top products were:

  • Apple iPod Touch
  • Apple iPod Nano
  • Asus Eee PC 1000HE
  • Canon PowerShot SD880 IS
  • Canon PowerShot SD890 IS
  • Garmin Nuvi 265WT
  • Nikon D90 Black
  • Samsung BD-P3600
  • Samsung LN52A650

Obviously we need to apply a bit of common sense as well to figure out which user manuals are going to be in demand from this product list - for example, perhaps an iPod Touch user interface is fairly self-explanatory, whereas maybe a Canon Powershot requires a bit more explanation. For that reason, we doing a bit of our filtering ourselves too to decide which manuals to feature first.

We’ve now chosen a couple of manuals to start a proof of concept trial and we’ll soon welcome to the first manuals in the doQer collection!

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What’s doQer?

Monday, April 20th, 2009

doQer was dreamt up to solve a problem: user manuals are a pain.

If you’re a company that makes widgets, the last thing you want to worry about is creating a user manual for them. You want to focus on making your widgets as good as possible.

But the people who are going to buy those widgets need to know how to use them. So you have to create instruction documentation, often in many different formats: a printed manual that you can ship with your product, a PDF file that your users can download, some online help files for your website, and so on.

It takes time to create and maintain all the different formats. In many companies, the formats are maintained separately, so whenever a change or correction is required it has to be made separately to the printed manual and the online version.

doQer aims to solve that problem. We’re creating a web application that will allow vendors to maintain just one user guide document, and will automatically create all the different formats of user information just from that one data source.

Simple, but (hopefully) very useful. We’d love to hear your feedback on features that we should be aiming for, and how we can develop the idea further.

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