One topic I am reading about, that I missed the discussion on over holiday break, is all this talk about whether people trust blogs on corporate websites. While I really don’t know where to put my two cents in about trust and corporate blogs (because I mostly write this blog just to interact with our users more), it did get me thinking about how you develop your ethos overall. In particular, I thought about how people learn to trust or not to trust documentation. Does it all depend on your first interaction when you search for help? Do you give up if you don’t find something on the first try? How do you decide whether you should trust the help content you are reading?
I know many times, depending on the product, my help file is an internet search on Google.com (scandalous coming from a technical writer, right?!). For some products, I trust the users more than the bare minimum, hard to find documentation.
However, I have read some product documentation and you can tell when the writers put in effort to be correct. I suppose that’s why I also like to blog, you get to be more transparent and ask for feedback. It’s why we do our survey too. We know you aren’t always going to find your answer on the first try, but because we care about your trust in us, we want to listen and improve. So if you ever want to tell us how we can earn/improve your trust in us, we’d be glad to spend some time hearing what you have to say. Then, it’s not asking for trust, it’s earning it bit by bit in our behavior on an everyday basis. 