Bridging users & manuals creatively
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Posts Tagged ‘help files’

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.

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!