writes Great Customer Technical Documents

I don’t expect anybody to curl up in front of the fireplace with a good tech manual. Tech manuals and other customer technical documentation are tools to be used to get a job done. After they've bought your product, your customers use your documents to understand your product, to make your product work, and to fix your product if it breaks (and if you want them to).

 

I write your documents so your customers understand your product. The documents you deliver are tools to use your product. Sometimes some new users need to know exactly what it is. How to start it up, shut it down and what to do in between to get the best job out of it. If your customers don’t use your documents, they don't use your product as well as you intended. When your customers can’t use your product to do the things you said it could, The Word gets around.

 

Maybe that sounds too harsh. But we both know that complex products don’t always get used by the people you train. If the complexity gets in the way of a user who is once or twice removed from the people you trained, that’s how your company gets judged. It happens.

 

The other side is even more true. Since your customers are looking for how-to helps so that they can get the most out of your highly engineered specialty machine, the manual is changing a mysterious black box into a genie that gets their job done for them.

 

Great manuals are great tools. I deliver.