Bridging users & manuals creatively
Enter your email address above to be alerted when doQer goes live!

Posts Tagged ‘marketing’

Bridging the Gap

Sunday, May 31st, 2009

Lack of product support is still a problem consumers encounter after purchasing a product. That’s an issue we want to address. doQer will provide the ability to place comments alongside product manuals, creating a portal where users can offer their feedback about a manual, and have all their questions answered by the product vendor.

Improving the communication between users and vendors is extremely beneficial to users because they can get their questions answered rapidly, ultimately creating a knowledge base for the community. What really drives doQer is the ability to give users reliable information by providing the opportunity for the actual product manufacturer to answer questions.

Product manufacturers will also take advantage of the ease of communication with their user base. They can quickly edit their manuals to clarify points, and gather feedback on the product they’ve released. Most importantly, doQer will allow manufacturers to build a good relationship with consumers by giving them an excellent customer experience.

Our aim does not stop at providing an accessible way for users to access their manuals. It goes beyond that, by bridging the existing gap between consumers and manufacturers.

Suffice or Entice?

Tuesday, May 12th, 2009

The original idea for doQer was inspired, in part at least, by a fantastic blog post from Kathy Sierra, founder of the Creating Passionate Users blog, that contrasts how vendors treat their customers before the sale compared to after the money has changed hands.

Her juxtaposition between the glossy brochures handed out to “entice”, compared to the grey user manuals that merely “suffice”, starkly illustrates an outdated approach to the user experience that, as Kathy points out, vendors just can’t afford to take any more. Users are talking to each other after the sale, and discovering the opinions of others before they purchase. The quality of user manuals now influences pre-sale decisions more than ever before.

That’s why we’re building doQer: we want to help vendors provide a great user experience after the sale, by providing instructions in a variety of different formats so users can pick and choose how they access the information.

Kathy says “What if instead of seducing potential users to buy, we seduced existing users to learn? … Truly passionate users will evangelize to others”. That really encapsulates the value of doQer.