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brochures handed out to “entice”, compared to the grey user manuals that merely “suffice”, starkly illustrates an outdated approach to the user experience that, as Kathy points out, vendors just can’t afford to take any more.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.