Users have gotten a bad rap. It’s often assumed by developers that if they do a good job coding a project, then users should just be able to use the software without any assistance.  When users fail to use the software (or hardware) as designed, developers throw up their hands and mutter about the stupidity of users.

To be fair, a lot of documentation is poorly written, badly organized, not indexed, and often causes users to throw up their hands and mutter about the stupidity of designers.

Companies deciding to forgo solid technical communications people in order to save short-term project costs are training users that the first thing they should do when they encounter a problem is not to look it up and try to solve it, but to pick up a phone, or start a trouble ticket.

But, the fact is, that no matter how well something is designed, coded, implemented and published; users still need solid documentation on how to use it.  Documentation is an important part of any product strategy and businesses ignore it at their own peril.  Poor documentation drives support calls, it drives product returns, and it drives bad reviews in public forums.

As an example; consider the gaming market.  Not too long ago, relatively simplistic games came with fairly sizable manuals. Now, the vast majority of games ship with a teeny pamphlet of instructions on how to install the game and game companies rely on 3rd party publishers to produce “strategy guides”.  Granted, this policy of forcing the user to either muddle blindly along, figuring things out as they go, or buying documentation that is often half again the price of the game, produces a small amount of income for the game company ( license fees) and a much larger income for the publisher; but it leaves the user feeling like they’ve been mugged.  Hardly the sort of bright and shiny happy feeling that keeps people spending money on new titles.

Many software houses are creeping slowly towards a similar model, where initial documentation is light, but “fee for support” services are heavy.  And while the costs of printing manuals may be prohibitive in some cases; producing those same manuals in a searchable form online is negligible when weighed against support costs and customer goodwill.

Good documentation can be expensive, but it’s a cost that should be calculated into any development project.  What a company will spend to support undocumented projects is astronomical compared to what it costs to produce usable, user-friendly, solid documentation.