I'm not sure what your question is...
User testing and focus groups are generally not focused on user assistance
(no pun intended). User testing and focus groups generally are used to try
to determine the usability of a product and its features, to find out what
customer requirements are, and to see how users actually USE the product.
If your organization does not do this type of user testing (during which you
can actually manage to steal an hour to get some docs tested), your best bet
is during the beta testing phase.
You should talk to the people who manage the beta program. They can provide
you with information on how to obtain information from possibly a select
group of users. Or they can include some questions in the beta questionnaire
about participating in a survey on the docs.
...sue
On 7/20/07, Kevin McLauchlan [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote:
... such unfamiliar concepts.
I wonder how many people get to actually DO that stuff.
The customers for my products are scattered around the world. The users
are mostly IT people and data-security people at big companies (banks and
credit-card companies and financial clearing houses and government
departments (various departments, various governments). Some are
developers
writing apps with which our hardware-and-software, or (gawd-forbid) a
competitor's, might be integrated.
Even if there were a perceived business need and a requirement to test my
documents or the user interface, I can't imagine where we'd acquire the
necessary bodies. Our customers aren't going to send their staff. We
aren't
going to visit them with a traveling road show (that would interact with
one
or two persons at each location). Our product and our market assume a
certain industry knowledge and experience that you don't get by rounding
up
some street people, nor even by raiding the local technical college for an
afternoon of diverting technical fun... and free donuts... :-)
The closest I can come are our in-house product testers (eng-test and QA)
and our support people. And they've mostly seen it all before, so they
can't
really simulate a naive customer/user all that well.
Sometimes I get access to a new kid for a day or three, which means that
the
introductory stuff and some of the basic config instructions have been
refined by such exposure over the years, but the victims always seem to
get pulled away to real work before they ever get into the more arcane
aspects of our products (or of my documents about same).
Is there a whole world of possibility that I'm missing here?
Kevin in Ottawa
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