Comments on: Documentation Feedback: Don’t Ask if You Don’t Care

By: Documentation Feedback: Don’t Ask if You Don’t Care

Documentation Feedback: Don’t Ask if You Don’t Care — Sun, 19 Jul 2009 04:50:11 +0000

[...] Documentation Feedback: Don’t Ask if You Don’t Care [...]

By: Frank

Frank — Sat, 06 Jun 2009 07:02:46 +0000

The non-working, no-replies feedback form is there for the people who DON'T use it, not the people who DO. It's there to create the impression the company cares, when in reality, they have run the numbers and concluded caring is not cost-effective.

There's also an unshakeable corporate conviction at work: that if something's wrong with your product, you will be less liable and look better NOT admitting to it than owning up. How companies keep believing this in the face of so much evidence to the contrary is hard to understand. Chalk it up to the kind of self-delusion you need to rise in in dustry these days, I suppose.

By: Frank

Frank — Sat, 06 Jun 2009 02:02:46 +0000

By: marascio

marascio — Tue, 19 May 2009 00:16:26 +0000

Sandra,

I'd say that would be a minimum. If a user goes through the effort to give feedback, it is IMO an opportunity to open a conversation and gain insight into their experiences. At best, you can get direct customer feedback on more than just the documentation, and at worst you should definitely respond to them and make sure they know their suggestions have been heard.

By: Sandra

Sandra — Mon, 18 May 2009 16:47:50 +0000

Interesting. So would it be best practices to respond to doc feedback submitted by a form like this? Perhaps to just acknowledge it was received and tracked as doc bug xyz?

By: marascio

marascio — Thu, 07 May 2009 19:48:20 +0000

All great points, Robby. User contributions are definitely valuable, and if companies don't effectively encourage and capture that feedback then it will migrate elsewhere.

By: robbyslaughter

robbyslaughter — Thu, 07 May 2009 06:04:59 +0000

Often, user feedback to documentation is more useful than the documentation itself. For example, both the online MySQL and PHP reference materials at the official websites have user-submitted commentary at the bottom of each page. These will often include code suggestions, workarounds, highlight common problems and generally explain how the function or feature actually works. (The notes on floating point numbers are a great example.)

At some point, user-generated content becomes more interesting than official content. I suspect most technical problems are solved through Google searches that lead to places other than the corporate website of the system in question. Perhaps sites like stackoverflow.com will mitigate the value in comprehensive documentation from the original creators!

@robbyslaughter