Documentation Feedback: Don’t Ask if You Don’t Care
Companies are starting to realize that it’s in their best interests to try to engage with their users and let them provide feedback across various touch points. One such example is in their documentation. Being able to leave comments and feedback on documentation is an effective way to engage with your end users, but if companies aren’t careful they run the risk of turning an opportunity to grow a happy user into one that creates a bad experience and drives the user away.
Take, for example, Daniel Worthington’s experience with the HP documentation and support site described in his eloquently titled blog post, HP Printer Documentation Sucks. If you weren’t convinced after seeing the title then reading the first paragraph will reassure you that Daniel’s experience was bad:
> I recently had to turn to HP’s online help documentation while setting up a networked color inkjet printer for a Faculty member at work. I always dread visiting HP’s website, but on this particular day my experience was unusually heinous.
Daniel describes a frustrating experience trying to find the help he needed. Recall from my previous post, Does Your Documentation Suck?, that there are three critical factors needed for good documentation:
1. Quality and Completeness of Content
2. Search, Browse, and Read Experience
3. Interactions and Content Freshness
Daniel’s experience illustrates that if you lack any of these then you risk frustrating your user at a time that they most need to have a positive experience. He found inaccurate procedures, a frustrating search experience, and a feedback process that left him feeling ignored.
Remember, users reading documentation are usually looking for help or looking to be influenced. At this time, they are *ripe* for you as a company to turn them into an engaged user with something positive to say about your product or company. Unfortunately, Daniel’s experience is all too common and the documentation or support process fails to help them solve their problem, or at the very minimum creates significant heart ache.
To add insult to injury Daniel goes on to try to help improve the experience of users that may follow him.
> Well, right underneath the very usefull Stuffit Expander disclaimer is a “content feedback” form where I can vent my frustration and hopefully someone at HP will take a look and write up some better documentation. So I filled out the form. I tried to be constructive. I pointed out that “upgrade install” didn’t make much sense and that removing all the printers wasn’t the most user friendly approach.
> “This is good,” I’m thinking. “I’m making a difference.” I clicked submit. Oops, page not found. I guess I should have read the very bottom of the page before I clicked submit:
>
Please note this form is for feedback only, so you will not receive a response.
> The sad thing is, this little document is just the tip of the iceburg. HP: your printer driver documenation for Mac OS X Sucks.
He actually tried to leave feedback only to be brushed aside by a poorly designed web site that didn’t work.
Companies of the world: your documentation, and more broadly your support experience, is a unique opportunity for you to help a customer out of a jam and in doing so potentially turn them into an engaged, happy, contributing user within your community. If you’re trying to do this, and by all means it appears that HP was at least interested in hearing what their users have to say, you *must* follow through. Asking for feedback and then failing to hear it (whether intentionally or through a failure to receive it) is a sure way to create a bad experience and grumpy users both of which have a negative impact on your business way beyond the initial interaction, as is illustrated by Daniel’s blog post.
### Let us know what you think!
Do you have a good story about when documentation has helped or hurt your experience with a company? Let us know, we want to hear from you!
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