product documentation

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Not ALL Pictures Are Worth 1,024 Words!!

OK, is it just me, or has the “online video instead of real documentation” craze already gone too far?  I’m talking about the products you can download, usually software, that have an accompanying set of videos to teach you how to use the product. That’s fine for a tutorial, but what if you start using the product, and you get to step 4, and you can’t remember what to do next?  You can click on “Help”, but there’s probably nothing there.

I can appreciate that different people have different learning styles, and that the MTV generation might take in and process and remember visual information better than other generations, but sometimes, don’t you want to just be able to “look something up”?  There’s a big Adwords product out there right now that does this, and when I asked the author if there would be a manual anytime soon, he said he was too busy with his next project to worry about it.  Needless to say, I don’t use the product much anymore.

Hmmmm, maybe I should ask him if he would mind if I wrote a manual and sold it….

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Written by blogger on April 4th, 2006 with no comments.
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