From the Doc Side : feedback

Developing Trust in Help Content

Lindsey Robbins — Tue, 13 Jan 2009 19:48:00 GMT

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.

Have a Helpful Idea?

Lindsey Robbins — Thu, 20 Nov 2008 18:56:00 GMT

Your suggestions are heard. Yes, I know it can be hard to believe sometimes but some people (finger pointing at me and the rest of Blackbaud) love to listen. Listening is fun because you don’t have to pretend to know everything. You can let others share their unique experiences, thoughts, and visions with you. And then as Shaun Sullivan said, steal it as your own genius idea. Okay, I don’t think I really have the guts to claim credit from anyone (and I'm pretty sure he was joking) but I do dig hearing other people’s ideas and researching them further.

In fact, a bunch of our technical writers were sitting in Shaun’s Emerging Technology session at Blackbaud’s Conference for Nonprofits this past Monday and listening. He was discussing how you can search the Infinity apps and how it intelligently provides results including an index of our help. And a great question was asked… Can you pull in a 3rd party help to be indexed as well?

Hmmm… good idea!

As our senior technical writer said in the session, we’ll look into it. And let me say, I’m pretty sure we’ll have some great discussions and research about it. Either way, I want to acknowledge that the question was great!

So what’s the point?

I just wanted the opportunity to say we’d love for you to share any other ideas you have. None are bad. All ideas, even in the most basic form, can be sparks for improvement, conversations, and even other ideas. To submit a good idea, leave a comment on the post (login or register for free in the upper right corner) or email us anytime at documentationcomments@blackbaud.com.

What Do Users Need?

Lindsey Robbins — Thu, 06 Nov 2008 19:09:00 GMT

A simple question. What do users need? My mind starts thinking about it and I realize there are just too many answers to mentally fathom. Recently, someone on my team shared a great link to discussion results from a recent CIDM conference.

http://www.infomanagementcenter.com/enewsletter/200811/third.htm

I thought the "What we learned" section contained a lot of great answers. Seems thorough but of course it can never be a complete list. Users' needs are ever evolving and ever changing.

However, one particular statement I've thought about before came up in the discussion.

Users need answers to their questions.

Obvious - Yes. Easy to execute - No. How can you ever provide all the answers to each individual's questions? The answer is you probably can't but you try to answer as many as you can and provide ways to answer the rest by other means.

In Documentation, we recognize that while we aim to help every single user, there are times where your particular situation calls for Knowledgebase or Customer Support. However, that doesn't stop us from trying. Your questions always provide us opportunities to improve our Help.

Here are the main lessons learned from the article...

Answer the users' questions and help them do their job.
Make it easy for users to find the answer.
Provide users access or links to related information.
Give users an easy forum for reporting issues and collaborating.
Give users information in a format that suits their work environment.
Technology is changing user expectations.

What do you think, does this sound accurate?

Documentation Survey 3rd Quarter Results

Lindsey Robbins — Mon, 27 Oct 2008 14:37:00 GMT

On October 9th, Justin announced our third quarter documentation survey winner. I thought it might be nice to discuss some of our results from the survey with our blog readers.

A link to our survey appears on the Blackbaud User Guides pages (accessed from the Support menu), this blog, EE/FE/SIS Help files (a test run), and in the support newsletters once each quarter. We received 73 responses in Q3 2008.

Overall Key Findings:

For our five overall rating categories – Accuracy, Completeness, Easy to Understand, Accessibility, and Usefulness – the most frequent rating was a 4 or 5 (out of 5).
Our best overall rating category was Accuracy. Out of 73 responses, 62 rated us 4 or 5.
72.6% of survey respondents were able to find the answer to their question in the documentation the last time they accessed it.

Question: Please give an overall rating for the following aspects of documentation (user guides and help files only) on a scale of 1 (least favorable) to 5 (most favorable)?

Discussion:
While we are pleased our numbers are mostly 4’s and 5’s we are actively looking for opportunities to improve and we even received some great suggestions from the open ended responses on the survey.

Question: Which Blackbaud product were you using when you accessed the documentation (user guides and help files)?

Product	Responses	Percentage
The Raiser's Edge	51	69.9%
The Financial Edge	11	15.1%
The Education Edge	4	5.5%
BSIS	1	1.4%
BBNC	5	6.8%
The Patron Edge	1	1.4%
The Information Edge	0	0.0%
BBDM	0	0.0%
ResearchPoint	0	0.0%

Discussion: While we are always pleased with the number of responses for The Raiser’s Edge, we are looking for ways to improve the amount of feedback we receive for our other products. While we know we don’t have as many users on The Patron Edge as The Raiser's Edge, we value each user’s feedback equally.

Question: The last time you had a question, did you find the answer in the documentation (user guides and help files)?

Discussion: We are happy to have so many “yes” answers to this question. We hope it means you find your answer quickly and get back to completing your tasks. However, we also see that 27.4% of you did not find your answer. This question is one of our critical ones. We’d love for to you always find your answer. Our numbers have been improving in this category but there is always more room for improvement.

Here are some sample user comments and suggestions pulled from the survey (only initials to protect the privacy of our clients):

User guides are enormous. Small, more streamlined versions, maybe for more discrete tasks would be helpful. I frequently find myself selectively printing only the relevant sections of a guide.
TH

The user guides are easy to understand and are helpful. I like being able to find an answer without having to call customer support.
JH

Love the support offered by Blackbaud, especially easy access to the User Guides - don't have to buy a hard copy, and don't have to deal with free documentation that is purposely incomplete in effort to get me to buy the manual! Good job Blackbaud. Always happy to recommend your company.
AB

Your User Guides are very extensive and frequently help me answer my questions. However,
sometimes when searching I get results that are not dealing with the program I specified.
JF

I especially like the guides when I want an initial overview of the module. They are well organized and explain the technical aspects very clearly.
MT

Discussion: I think the open ended comments are my favorite part of the survey. It's not easy to quantify the information but hearing exactly what you think is critical. And, we take what you say to heart. If you allow us too, we try to follow up with as many people as possible especially when they offer up suggestions, areas for improvements, or mention problems. For example, to the user who mentioned the guides are enormous we would try to see if it would have been better for the user to search for the answer in the help file versus the user guides. Sometimes it can be a matter of choosing the right resource in the situation. And, we do realize that we are unable to help every user every time because there can be situations when contacting the help desk is the right decision.

Thanks again to our Q3 survey respondents! And remember, if you take our survey, every quarter we enter the respondents into a drawing for a $25 Amazon.com gift card.

How do you like your help?

Lindsey Robbins — Mon, 11 Aug 2008 21:00:00 GMT

In the evolution of software help, user assistance content has taken many shapes and forms. The search for the best way to assist you in your every day work processes is an ever changing quest. Long, jargon filled, and confusing technical documentation is hopefully outdated. And hopefully too, the short picture diagrams with confusing instructions. How did we ever figure out how to put furniture together before technical communicators? However, we know that’s not always the case.

Why is it so difficult to make help easy? Well one difficulty is keeping up with how fast software can change but more so it’s about meeting user’s expectations for help in the program. Here are some questions we might struggle with on a daily/monthly/yearly basis –

User Guides -

When you access help, do you want a user guide?
Do you want to see the user guide on the screen side-by-side with the program or do you want to print it out and go page by page?
Do you take notes when you print the manuals?
Do you want a lot of detail or does that take up too much time and paper?
Are you a visual learner? Do we need more or less screen captures?
If we have more, that’s more pages and bigger file sizes.
Do you have the internet bandwidth to download big user guides?
How do we document everything but not overwhelm you with the number of user guides?
Do you learn by area of the program or depending on the process you’re performing?

Help Files -
Or, are you the type of user who doesn’t have the time for printed manuals and you just want your answer now. You want to search through a help file or knowledgebase and get back to doing your work.

If you are this type, how do you search?
Do you want similar information as the user guide or do you want just problem solving information?
Do you need visuals?
Do you need a glossary or index?
How do you want the help to appear in relation to the program?
How do you access the help? Do you want to hit F1 on the keyboard? Need a question mark icon to click? Or do you miss the days of Microsoft Word when that paper clip would pop up trying to guess when you needed help?

General Documentation Questions -
Then there is the multitude of other questions we might ask ourselves:

Do you want other user’s advice on what works or doesn’t work? Kinda like user reviews on store websites.
Do you want to be able to edit the content yourself?
Add a comment?
Do you want to save the documentation so you don’t have to remember it?
Do we need more web 2.0 types of content and how would we manage it?
And even more so, how can we marry the help files, user guides with other efforts in the company like knowledgebase, training, and support?

These are a few questions jumping off the top of my head. If I quizzed other team members, I’m sure this post would become exponentially longer. We do know from our documentation survey you still prefer having user guides. But we then have to manage how your expectations might change now and in the future. If we don’t start preparing now we won’t be ready then.

This topic really struck a note with me recently because a well respected technical communicator in the field decided to publish content for her users in the form of a wiki and stop creating manuals.

I’m interested in seeing how this goes. I’m aware that her audience needs might be radically different than ours but when you’re focused on day-to-day tasks it can be hard to remember to look out and see how our field is trending. I’m not sure what our users will ask of us in the years to come. It’s exciting and I know whatever you expect of us, we’ll do our best to deliver top quality.

Have any opinions?

Documentation’s Online Survey

Justin Ward — Tue, 13 May 2008 18:36:00 GMT

Last year, the documentation team created an online survey to capture client feedback about our help content. We’ve done surveys in the past, and while we typically came away with valuable information, we always wished we’d gotten more responses. So this time around, we tried something a little different. Instead of the survey being a one-hit-wonder, we decided to leave the survey up indefinitely -- or as long as our users keep responding.

So far, this approach has worked well. The survey went live last year, and to date, we’ve received over 300 responses. Now, when we evaluate the data, we have more information to base our decisions on, and we can compare response trends from quarter to quarter.

What do we do with the information?
The whole purpose of this project is to improve our help content, both in the help files and user guides. We review survey responses on a weekly basis. When we need more clarification about something a user said, or when users have problems with our documentation, we contact them (just the users who give us permission). All this feedback is then compiled and shared with the team. When we analyze the data, we look for trends in responses so that we can focus our discussions.

For example, we recently focused our improvement efforts on five specific Raiser’s Edge user guides. By reviewing the survey data from the past year, we knew where the problem areas were in these guides. I don’t think we could have honed in on these guides and made meaningful changes without having such a high volume of client feedback over an extended period of time.

We've restructured and reorganized guides for other products as well, improved indexes, and added additional cross references to make our content easier to use. We found that in many cases, we had the information users needed, but they couldn't find it!

Right now, we are averaging 50 to 75 responses per quarter, and I hope this trend continues. If you haven’t taken our survey and would like to, click here. And don’t forget, each quarter we randomly select one of our survey respondents for a $25 Amazon gift card.