Replies to This Discussion

Permalink Reply by Richard S. on February 15, 2012 at 1:02pm

I think your forum analogy doesn't hold. Forum information may get stale, but chronology assists users in distinguishing between current and stale. Also there is no authoritative information on a forum. You get what you get, and it's up to you to vet the information. Commercial technical docs are perceived a little differently. Same with answers sites like Yahoo answers. Just a few weeks ago my teenage son quipped "Yahoo answers is the "go to" place if you want a variety of wrong answers from people who know everything."  

I do recognize your point about community though. For a commercial provider like Atlassian, they have an interesting challenge. They try to make the docs the correct, authoritative source, and when a comment reveals something confusing in the docs, they are left with a choice.

The can:

a) leave the doc as is, and expect readers to parse comments too
b) fix the doc and leave the comment, which might confuse readers who look at both.
c) fix the doc and remove the comment.    

I believe they do "b" most of the time, but they also carry comments forward on a doc that's carried forward. That is, if docs for product release 2.0 has the same topic as product release 4.0, the 4.0 page will have comments spanning multiple product generations.  I think this exacerbates the problem a bit. (btw, Sarah, I don't mean to pick on Atlassian... it's just a handy example since I have experience with confluence as a user, admin, and writer).  

I suspect that there is a middle ground, where a judicious application of approaches (a/b/c) makes sense, but with an aim to keep as much intact as possible.  

>> So here's my proposition: comments are not feedback; they are the seeds of community and should be valued, nurtured, and preserved as such. Discuss.

I agree in principle, but this is one of those cases where the real world application explodes any cohesive theory pretty quickly. Comments are indeed seeds of the community, but (sadly) communities need people to take out the garbage. For a suite of docs like Atlassian, commenters will use comments for support tickets, self-promotion (spam), and a range of silly stuff like "Please advice to create an online banking website using Confluence." 

And while it may be mutually agreeable that there is garbage to be taken out, it's logical to extend that to thinking about landscaping the yard too. Forums do this with stickies and moderation. It's rarely a uniform policy enforcement, but as you note, it mostly works. 

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Permalink Reply by Mark Baker on February 15, 2012 at 1:35pm

Richard, I agree that there are a great many important issues to figure out with this model. We an in our infancy in this in many ways. Of course, companies have been creating communities or users for years with everything from user conferences to forums to mailing lists. What is new here is the use of the documentation directly as the seed purl of community.

This usage does raise interesting and important questions about authority and versioning that do not occur in a stand-alone forum. It is going to take a lot of time and effort and experiment to find out how to balance all the issues.

Among other thing we are going to have to recognize that the user community often regards the experience of their fellow users as more authoritative than the official words of the company. One can remember, for example, the undocumented Windows API controversy of the 90s when third-party books came to be considered more authoritative than Microsoft's own documentation. These days it is hard to maintain authority without transparency.

But the core issue still seems clear enough: you can either treat the comments as feedback -- purely an inbound message to be used and discarded -- or you can treat them as community property and accept that however you manage them, it has to be in a way that the community accepts and participates in. The mechanisms of the latter are murky; the principle is clear.

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Permalink Reply by Richard S. on February 15, 2012 at 5:48pm

Yep. I agree. 

"Cool story bro" related to this comment: 

Among other thing we are going to have to recognize that the user community often regards the experience of their fellow users as more authoritative than the official words of the company.

We recently did a series of post-integration visits with many of our partners (our partners are the "customers" of our SDK; they use it to make TVs and set top boxes).

In these visits, we struck up a conversation about the utility of user forums. Our thinking was that we are software people with a particular expertise in our own app, but their peers probably had more expertise in certain aspects of device development than we do, particularly when it comes to things that are more software-hardware integration areas. In short, we thought that there were times when community members would be more authoritative than us, and we figured our partners would see it that way too. It turns out that they didn't; they ranged from mildly against the idea to strongly against it, with several specifically saying that they wouldn't trust the authority of community contributions.

I dont't think this disputes the claim though, just one interesting case. It's a fiercely competitive industry where most of them are a little suspicious on one another, so we weren't totally surprised by this, but we were surprised that the range of answers was from no to aw hellz no. We only got one person that said he'd actually use it, but that was only as a lurker. Not a strong community there. ;-) 

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Permalink Reply by Mark Baker on February 15, 2012 at 6:14pm

Once, long ago, I worked for an Apple dealer and the local Apple office decided to bring people together from all the local Apple dealers in the area and create a forum where they could exchange information and help each other out. The meeting where they announced this was interesting. They outlined their plan. There was as awkward silence, and eventually someone stuck up a hand and explained to them that we were all competitors and that basically we were all trying to put each other out of business -- there was no way we were going to share anything of provide any help to the enemy.

So yes, if you are in a vertical where all of your customers are direct competitors with each other, then there is not going to be any community content, and if there is, no one is going to trust it. All part of what makes this an ever more segmented profession where different organizations need different skills and different solutions.

Actually, I think that may be the single most important development in technical communication over the next 10 years: the increasing segmentation of what used to be a highly homogeneous profession in which writer's skills were highly transferable and everyone was producing the same kinds of outputs using the same kinds of tools. I thought for a while that we would go through a period of disruption as we adapted to the Web and then settle into a new normal. I no longer see it like that. Neither writer qualifications nor tools and deliverables are consistent from one vertical to another any more, and I now expect that the segmentation will continue to increase over the next decade.

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Permalink Reply by Sanjay G on February 13, 2012 at 9:22pm

Feedback option added with email address is the best option for receiving the feedback from the readers.

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Permalink Reply by Dave Wilks on February 16, 2012 at 2:39pm

We embed a link to a survey monkey survey in our online help. Now, the questions on that survey could use some help in getting some real useful answers, but it's a start.

I would love to explore socializing the help system. I've used the Confluence help (thanks Sarah) and have mined as much information from the comments as I have the help content. Also, for some internal content on our Confluence wiki, we encourage commenting. Unfortunately, that has been underutilized.

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Permalink Reply by Tammy Butcher on February 24, 2012 at 10:15pm

The survey monkey is an interesting thought that had not occurred to me.  We currently use two different forms of Help for two different products; RoboHelp and a Wiki.

I have not yet solicited feedback for either because of the development time it would take for the scripts involved to imbed the feedback forms into RoboHelp, etc. (from what I understand by my research).  Survey monkey might be a start for us as well.

As far as the wiki goes, given that we have a hard time gettig anyone but the writing staff to collaborate, I have a hard time seeing anyone commenting either.

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Permalink Reply by Daniel Archer on February 27, 2012 at 7:50am

Some good ideas here. We have closed systems deployed on secure networks, so a lot of the ideas here are out for us. We don't have the clout to do anything that requires development resources, but we did put a quick and dirty "Feedback" hot link in the footer of each help topic (RoboHelp). The link opens an email in their default application (which we know to be Outlook) with a subject "Feedback for <Topic X>" and our support desk in the To field. The help desk is supposed to route any such emails to us.

Sad to say that in the year or so we've been doing this, we've had 0 such emails on any of the applications we support. Most of the feedback comes from the field trainers who travel to various client sites, so our best strategy is to simply grill those individuals when we get the opportunity.

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Permalink Reply by Gordon Meyer on March 10, 2012 at 5:41pm

If your content is displayed in a help viewer, and not on the web, you're better off putting a link to the feedback system. It provides a sort of "qualifying" step where you can be sure that the user is able to reach the web before they enter in a bunch of text that ultimately would be lost. (For example, in a library, they might be blocking full web access.)

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