Readers of this blog will know I that I tend to push, pretty hard sometimes, the need for software companies including Microsoft to be customer-centric.
One of the issues where I feel that many companies fall down is on the provision of Help.
I mentioned a few weeks back the problems with Office 2003 Help, Office 2003 Help needs to be improved .
But there are problems with other Help files too. Take a look at the Help files which come with Windows SharePoint Services, a part of Windows 2003. There is no decent Contents page to speak of, no index and no search facility. I assume that the "great idea" behind Windows SharePoint Services Help is to provide Help using the technology that the Help is about. If the Help files included essential functionality like well-structured content, a good index and a powerful and flexible Search facility then that approach might have worked well. As it is, one of my wishes for the next version of Windows SharePoint Services is that there will be better Help provided.
In a product which I am seeing under NDA there is a Help page about keyboard shortcuts. That, in turn, links to two pages about Help on File menu keyboard shortcuts and Edit menu keyboard shortcuts. Put aside the fact that customers can see these keyboard shortcuts much more quickly by simply selecting the menus named. The creators of the Help files are providing developer-orientated or program-orientated Help when what is really needed is task-orientated Help. A customer wants to know the keyboard shortcut to perform a task. So it makes good sense, to me at least, to structure the Help about keyboard shortcuts in terms of customer tasks.
I am sure that customer-centric Help will be much more useful than program-orientated Help files. It just needs awareness of the need for customer-centric Help and a little leap of imagination to understand how customers will use the program. A little more work certainly, but in an era when certain aspects of the spectrum of software are becoming commodities customer service - in this case in the provision of relevant Help files - is a potentially powerful distinguishing factor in a highly competitive marketplace.
Posted by Andrew Watt at March 27, 2004 08:56 AM