Adobe documentation (business owners take note)
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John C wrote:
we point them to it and say "that's covered in the manual on page blah blah" and they often are belligerent and say "why are you making me read the manual, just tell me right now how to do it"
Yup, that actually happened to me. I actually bought a plane ticket to Ohio because the guy invited me up there to "kick my ass". I was more than happy to oblige him, so I bought a ticket on the next flight from San Diego to Columbus, and was leaving the parking lot on my way to the airport when the boss came running our to stop me. The next day, they hired someone else to do technical support. :)
"Why don't you tie a kerosene-soaked rag around your ankles so the ants won't climb up and eat your candy ass..." - Dale Earnhardt, 1997
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"...the staggering layers of obscenity in your statement make it a work of art on so many levels." - Jason Jystad, 10/26/2001:laugh: You bad ass! You are now my new icon of awesomeness! :laugh:
If the post was helpful, please vote! Current activities: Book: Devils by Fyodor Dostoyevsky Project: Hospital Automation, final stage Learning: Image analysis, LINQ Now and forever, defiant to the end. What is Multiple Sclerosis[^]?
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During the video upgrade of the studio, I decided to move from Vegas (I was 5 revs back) to Adobe Premiere Pro CS4. Being a geek at heart, I have a tendency to RTFM from cover to cover on new software to get a feel for the wheel. It goes without saying these days that there was no printed manual shipped, only a couple of DVDs. So, looked on the installation disk and there was no pdf documentation, nor was any installed. There was a DVD of movie tutorials, lame at best, and certainly not comprehensive. Upon further exploration, I discovered that bringing up help lead to a path where you could download the help file in pdf. Being rather old school, I know that a good help file is not at all the same as the user manual, but apparently this is no longer true. The help file is indeed the manual. Fine. Whatever. If you're too cheap to print one, at the very least you shouldn't make the customer scratch his head and poke around in order to find the user manual. Make it easy to use your product. I get much of my reading done in the bathroom, hence the stack of books and magazines. Perhaps you're comfortable with balancing a laptop at such times. I am not. Consequently, what I need is printed documentation. So, after stepping through, one app at a time, hunting down the pdf file and downloading it, I now get to print manuals out on my non-full-duplex printer. Those of you familiar with printing a 500 page manual in such a manner will no doubt have emotional scars from printing the second side only to have something get out of sync a third of the way through, forcing you to do multiple iterations to get it all done. And yes, I have nothing but free time to screw around with this stuff, thanks for asking. This is yet another example of companies making the customer do their work for free. I know nothing of Adobe Premiere, and I'm willing and eager to RTFM. However, before I can even begin learning how to use the software I just paid for, I have to jump through a number of PITA hoops that, as a customer, I shouldn't have to deal with. My point? Pushing off the work to the customer is an all too common practice today, in a great many industries, to the point where it's become standard operating procedure. Want to really stand out from the crowd, get excellent word of mouth and the loyalty of your customers? Think like a customer and bend over backwards to make their experience a pleasure, not a hassle. You'd be surprised what a huge competitive edge this can be since few companies think like this anymore.
I could not agree more. As a side rant, when you buy a book and have to go to their site do download the code. I understand that it may be buggy and need to be updated but just give me the disk. Book prices have not come down so why no disk?? Mike
"It doesn't matter how big a ranch ya' own, or how many cows ya' brand, the size of your funeral is still gonna depend on the weather." -Harry Truman.
Semper Fi http://www.hq4thmarinescomm.com[^] My Site
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John C wrote:
we point them to it and say "that's covered in the manual on page blah blah" and they often are belligerent and say "why are you making me read the manual, just tell me right now how to do it"
Yup, that actually happened to me. I actually bought a plane ticket to Ohio because the guy invited me up there to "kick my ass". I was more than happy to oblige him, so I bought a ticket on the next flight from San Diego to Columbus, and was leaving the parking lot on my way to the airport when the boss came running our to stop me. The next day, they hired someone else to do technical support. :)
"Why don't you tie a kerosene-soaked rag around your ankles so the ants won't climb up and eat your candy ass..." - Dale Earnhardt, 1997
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"...the staggering layers of obscenity in your statement make it a work of art on so many levels." - Jason Jystad, 10/26/2001John Simmons / outlaw programmer wrote:
I actually bought a plane ticket to Ohio because the guy invited me up there to "kick my ass". I was more than happy to oblige him
That's excellent customer service, really going out of your way to give the customer what he asked for ... :rolleyes:
:..::. Douglas H. Troy ::..
Bad Astronomy |VCF|wxWidgets|WTL -
We have a full manual complete with tutorials and helpful tip and tricks, you name it. It's online and also downloadable in word or pdf format. You can access it by pressing f1 from any area of our app or from the download link where the software is downloaded etc etc. We have thousands of users in over 40 countries last time I checked and I'm willing to bet judging by the support questions and forum questions that no more than 1% have *ever* cracked the manual or bothered to look at it. People ask dead simple questions about stuff that's described in detail right at the top of the manual, we point them to it and say "that's covered in the manual on page blah blah" and they often are belligerent and say "why are you making me read the manual, just tell me right now how to do it". People in general seem to have an active dislike for reading *anything* these days. How many people even read books for enjoyment these days? I tell people I read a few chapters of a book every night before I go to sleep and they are shocked I don't have a tv instead in my bedroom so I don't "have" to read. On the other hand we have video tutorials and those are used heavily. They aren't offloading work to the customer they are putting resources where they do the most good. Us developers are probably the highest manual reading class of software users there is and it just drops off steeply from there. They *should* make it very easily accessed i.e. f1 button I agree. If you're going to the expense of making a manual then make it available for the readers out there. We've noticed this trend getting greater and greater in the last 10 years. We've often thought we should just make a cartoon manual since people hate to read so much these days.
"Creating your own blog is about as easy as creating your own urine, and you're about as likely to find someone else interested in it." -- Lore Sjöberg
John C wrote:
we have video tutorials and those are used heavily.
That's interesting. I have been wondering about it. I personally hate watching videos about a topic because they take far more time compared to reading about the same topic.
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During the video upgrade of the studio, I decided to move from Vegas (I was 5 revs back) to Adobe Premiere Pro CS4. Being a geek at heart, I have a tendency to RTFM from cover to cover on new software to get a feel for the wheel. It goes without saying these days that there was no printed manual shipped, only a couple of DVDs. So, looked on the installation disk and there was no pdf documentation, nor was any installed. There was a DVD of movie tutorials, lame at best, and certainly not comprehensive. Upon further exploration, I discovered that bringing up help lead to a path where you could download the help file in pdf. Being rather old school, I know that a good help file is not at all the same as the user manual, but apparently this is no longer true. The help file is indeed the manual. Fine. Whatever. If you're too cheap to print one, at the very least you shouldn't make the customer scratch his head and poke around in order to find the user manual. Make it easy to use your product. I get much of my reading done in the bathroom, hence the stack of books and magazines. Perhaps you're comfortable with balancing a laptop at such times. I am not. Consequently, what I need is printed documentation. So, after stepping through, one app at a time, hunting down the pdf file and downloading it, I now get to print manuals out on my non-full-duplex printer. Those of you familiar with printing a 500 page manual in such a manner will no doubt have emotional scars from printing the second side only to have something get out of sync a third of the way through, forcing you to do multiple iterations to get it all done. And yes, I have nothing but free time to screw around with this stuff, thanks for asking. This is yet another example of companies making the customer do their work for free. I know nothing of Adobe Premiere, and I'm willing and eager to RTFM. However, before I can even begin learning how to use the software I just paid for, I have to jump through a number of PITA hoops that, as a customer, I shouldn't have to deal with. My point? Pushing off the work to the customer is an all too common practice today, in a great many industries, to the point where it's become standard operating procedure. Want to really stand out from the crowd, get excellent word of mouth and the loyalty of your customers? Think like a customer and bend over backwards to make their experience a pleasure, not a hassle. You'd be surprised what a huge competitive edge this can be since few companies think like this anymore.
Christopher Duncan wrote:
This is yet another example of companies making the customer do their work for free.
You're not doing the work for free. You're doing it for the price reduction in the software that was made possible by Adobe not including a printed manual in the first place.
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John C wrote:
we have video tutorials and those are used heavily.
That's interesting. I have been wondering about it. I personally hate watching videos about a topic because they take far more time compared to reading about the same topic.
I feel the same, but the illiteratti can watch a video in a fraction of the time it takes to read the text. :((
It is a truth universally acknowledged that a zombie in possession of brains must be in want of more brains. -- Pride and Prejudice and Zombies
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I could not agree more. As a side rant, when you buy a book and have to go to their site do download the code. I understand that it may be buggy and need to be updated but just give me the disk. Book prices have not come down so why no disk?? Mike
"It doesn't matter how big a ranch ya' own, or how many cows ya' brand, the size of your funeral is still gonna depend on the weather." -Harry Truman.
Semper Fi http://www.hq4thmarinescomm.com[^] My Site
Book manufacturing prices have gone up. Adding a disk costs between $1 and 2; but I'm not sure if this amount is calculated at retail, or from the publishers end. Where the charge is applied makes a large difference in its 'real' cost. For every dollar of the cover price, 50-60c go to the retailer (Amazon gets at bigger discount on truckload than Mom and Pop do for 5 copies. 8-15c go to the author as royalties (depending on printing type and sales volume), the distributor gets a few cents, the remaining 20-40 cents goes to the publisher to pay for printing, editing, marketing, losses on flops, etc. For the curious, discounts (eg loyalty cards or Amazons hard cover discounts) come out of the retailers nominal profit, the upstream flow of cash isn't affected.
It is a truth universally acknowledged that a zombie in possession of brains must be in want of more brains. -- Pride and Prejudice and Zombies
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During the video upgrade of the studio, I decided to move from Vegas (I was 5 revs back) to Adobe Premiere Pro CS4. Being a geek at heart, I have a tendency to RTFM from cover to cover on new software to get a feel for the wheel. It goes without saying these days that there was no printed manual shipped, only a couple of DVDs. So, looked on the installation disk and there was no pdf documentation, nor was any installed. There was a DVD of movie tutorials, lame at best, and certainly not comprehensive. Upon further exploration, I discovered that bringing up help lead to a path where you could download the help file in pdf. Being rather old school, I know that a good help file is not at all the same as the user manual, but apparently this is no longer true. The help file is indeed the manual. Fine. Whatever. If you're too cheap to print one, at the very least you shouldn't make the customer scratch his head and poke around in order to find the user manual. Make it easy to use your product. I get much of my reading done in the bathroom, hence the stack of books and magazines. Perhaps you're comfortable with balancing a laptop at such times. I am not. Consequently, what I need is printed documentation. So, after stepping through, one app at a time, hunting down the pdf file and downloading it, I now get to print manuals out on my non-full-duplex printer. Those of you familiar with printing a 500 page manual in such a manner will no doubt have emotional scars from printing the second side only to have something get out of sync a third of the way through, forcing you to do multiple iterations to get it all done. And yes, I have nothing but free time to screw around with this stuff, thanks for asking. This is yet another example of companies making the customer do their work for free. I know nothing of Adobe Premiere, and I'm willing and eager to RTFM. However, before I can even begin learning how to use the software I just paid for, I have to jump through a number of PITA hoops that, as a customer, I shouldn't have to deal with. My point? Pushing off the work to the customer is an all too common practice today, in a great many industries, to the point where it's become standard operating procedure. Want to really stand out from the crowd, get excellent word of mouth and the loyalty of your customers? Think like a customer and bend over backwards to make their experience a pleasure, not a hassle. You'd be surprised what a huge competitive edge this can be since few companies think like this anymore.
Ever since Microsoft pioneered undocumented software this situation has grown worse. And yes, I consider online "help" and manuals worthless. Give me books, entire forests of extinct deciduous trees of them - I don't care. If your product doesn't include a printed, comprehensive user manual, you haven't done your job.
"A Journey of a Thousand Rest Stops Begins with a Single Movement"
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During the video upgrade of the studio, I decided to move from Vegas (I was 5 revs back) to Adobe Premiere Pro CS4. Being a geek at heart, I have a tendency to RTFM from cover to cover on new software to get a feel for the wheel. It goes without saying these days that there was no printed manual shipped, only a couple of DVDs. So, looked on the installation disk and there was no pdf documentation, nor was any installed. There was a DVD of movie tutorials, lame at best, and certainly not comprehensive. Upon further exploration, I discovered that bringing up help lead to a path where you could download the help file in pdf. Being rather old school, I know that a good help file is not at all the same as the user manual, but apparently this is no longer true. The help file is indeed the manual. Fine. Whatever. If you're too cheap to print one, at the very least you shouldn't make the customer scratch his head and poke around in order to find the user manual. Make it easy to use your product. I get much of my reading done in the bathroom, hence the stack of books and magazines. Perhaps you're comfortable with balancing a laptop at such times. I am not. Consequently, what I need is printed documentation. So, after stepping through, one app at a time, hunting down the pdf file and downloading it, I now get to print manuals out on my non-full-duplex printer. Those of you familiar with printing a 500 page manual in such a manner will no doubt have emotional scars from printing the second side only to have something get out of sync a third of the way through, forcing you to do multiple iterations to get it all done. And yes, I have nothing but free time to screw around with this stuff, thanks for asking. This is yet another example of companies making the customer do their work for free. I know nothing of Adobe Premiere, and I'm willing and eager to RTFM. However, before I can even begin learning how to use the software I just paid for, I have to jump through a number of PITA hoops that, as a customer, I shouldn't have to deal with. My point? Pushing off the work to the customer is an all too common practice today, in a great many industries, to the point where it's become standard operating procedure. Want to really stand out from the crowd, get excellent word of mouth and the loyalty of your customers? Think like a customer and bend over backwards to make their experience a pleasure, not a hassle. You'd be surprised what a huge competitive edge this can be since few companies think like this anymore.
Christopher Duncan wrote:
Pushing off the work to the customer is an all too common practice today
In a few years, software products will simply be a fortune cookie, and on the little piece of paper it'll have a URL to Microsoft's VS Express with "writee yourselfee" on other side. Marc
I'm not overthinking the problem, I just felt like I needed a small, unimportant, uninteresting rant! - Martin Hart Turner
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During the video upgrade of the studio, I decided to move from Vegas (I was 5 revs back) to Adobe Premiere Pro CS4. Being a geek at heart, I have a tendency to RTFM from cover to cover on new software to get a feel for the wheel. It goes without saying these days that there was no printed manual shipped, only a couple of DVDs. So, looked on the installation disk and there was no pdf documentation, nor was any installed. There was a DVD of movie tutorials, lame at best, and certainly not comprehensive. Upon further exploration, I discovered that bringing up help lead to a path where you could download the help file in pdf. Being rather old school, I know that a good help file is not at all the same as the user manual, but apparently this is no longer true. The help file is indeed the manual. Fine. Whatever. If you're too cheap to print one, at the very least you shouldn't make the customer scratch his head and poke around in order to find the user manual. Make it easy to use your product. I get much of my reading done in the bathroom, hence the stack of books and magazines. Perhaps you're comfortable with balancing a laptop at such times. I am not. Consequently, what I need is printed documentation. So, after stepping through, one app at a time, hunting down the pdf file and downloading it, I now get to print manuals out on my non-full-duplex printer. Those of you familiar with printing a 500 page manual in such a manner will no doubt have emotional scars from printing the second side only to have something get out of sync a third of the way through, forcing you to do multiple iterations to get it all done. And yes, I have nothing but free time to screw around with this stuff, thanks for asking. This is yet another example of companies making the customer do their work for free. I know nothing of Adobe Premiere, and I'm willing and eager to RTFM. However, before I can even begin learning how to use the software I just paid for, I have to jump through a number of PITA hoops that, as a customer, I shouldn't have to deal with. My point? Pushing off the work to the customer is an all too common practice today, in a great many industries, to the point where it's become standard operating procedure. Want to really stand out from the crowd, get excellent word of mouth and the loyalty of your customers? Think like a customer and bend over backwards to make their experience a pleasure, not a hassle. You'd be surprised what a huge competitive edge this can be since few companies think like this anymore.
Some years ago, several studies found that there was an inverse relationship between experience and the use of manuals, printed or otherwise, and online help. When novice users do go to help, they don't want details, but walk-throughs; they want the steps to accomplish a task. You see the results of this in Microsoft Office. The implications for developers is huge. Our demographic uses online help of various kinds a lot, yet we are largely dealing with customers who don't. Unfortunately, the tendency for developers is to write the kind of factual help they (and the management paying salaries) prefer, not the step-by-step help customers prefer (but which is very expensive to produce.) As a side note, at one point the Adobe Premiere site explained why no manuals shipped with the product. I don't see it there now and it may have lasted only a short time when the change was first made. PS. I'm curious about your experience switching to Premiere. I've preferred earlier versions of Premiere over Vegas and most other editors (I've gone back and forth on AVID--I liked some of the features, but disliked others.) My experience was that Premiere is a harder product to learn, but is much more productive once learned. By comparison, learning the basics in Vegas was easy, but many advanced features were obscure, hard to figure out or simply absent (sliding the soundtrack to resync was a big pain. Unless it's changed, doing it in Premiere was a breeze, but I recognize that it just may have made more sense to me. S-cuts were also not even present in Vegas for a long time, if ever.)
Anyone who thinks he has a better idea of what's good for people than people do is a swine. - P.J. O'Rourke
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Christopher Duncan wrote:
This is yet another example of companies making the customer do their work for free.
You're not doing the work for free. You're doing it for the price reduction in the software that was made possible by Adobe not including a printed manual in the first place.
You mean I did all that nonsense for $10? Man, I'm working cheap.
Christopher Duncan www.PracticalUSA.com Author of The Career Programmer and Unite the Tribes Got a career question? Ask the Attack Chihuahua!
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Ever since Microsoft pioneered undocumented software this situation has grown worse. And yes, I consider online "help" and manuals worthless. Give me books, entire forests of extinct deciduous trees of them - I don't care. If your product doesn't include a printed, comprehensive user manual, you haven't done your job.
"A Journey of a Thousand Rest Stops Begins with a Single Movement"
Yeah, what you said. I'll start lobbying for forests when I see trees wearing little "Save the Humans" t-shirts. :)
Christopher Duncan www.PracticalUSA.com Author of The Career Programmer and Unite the Tribes Got a career question? Ask the Attack Chihuahua!
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Some years ago, several studies found that there was an inverse relationship between experience and the use of manuals, printed or otherwise, and online help. When novice users do go to help, they don't want details, but walk-throughs; they want the steps to accomplish a task. You see the results of this in Microsoft Office. The implications for developers is huge. Our demographic uses online help of various kinds a lot, yet we are largely dealing with customers who don't. Unfortunately, the tendency for developers is to write the kind of factual help they (and the management paying salaries) prefer, not the step-by-step help customers prefer (but which is very expensive to produce.) As a side note, at one point the Adobe Premiere site explained why no manuals shipped with the product. I don't see it there now and it may have lasted only a short time when the change was first made. PS. I'm curious about your experience switching to Premiere. I've preferred earlier versions of Premiere over Vegas and most other editors (I've gone back and forth on AVID--I liked some of the features, but disliked others.) My experience was that Premiere is a harder product to learn, but is much more productive once learned. By comparison, learning the basics in Vegas was easy, but many advanced features were obscure, hard to figure out or simply absent (sliding the soundtrack to resync was a big pain. Unless it's changed, doing it in Premiere was a breeze, but I recognize that it just may have made more sense to me. S-cuts were also not even present in Vegas for a long time, if ever.)
Anyone who thinks he has a better idea of what's good for people than people do is a swine. - P.J. O'Rourke
That's my take as well. More to learn with Premeire (hence printing the FMs) as opposed to Vegas' intuitive approach. However, my gut feeling is that Adobe has much more horsepower, and there's also its integration with the host of other Adobe products. I don't mind the learning curve if the end result is worth it, and I suspect it will be.
Christopher Duncan www.PracticalUSA.com Author of The Career Programmer and Unite the Tribes Got a career question? Ask the Attack Chihuahua!
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During the video upgrade of the studio, I decided to move from Vegas (I was 5 revs back) to Adobe Premiere Pro CS4. Being a geek at heart, I have a tendency to RTFM from cover to cover on new software to get a feel for the wheel. It goes without saying these days that there was no printed manual shipped, only a couple of DVDs. So, looked on the installation disk and there was no pdf documentation, nor was any installed. There was a DVD of movie tutorials, lame at best, and certainly not comprehensive. Upon further exploration, I discovered that bringing up help lead to a path where you could download the help file in pdf. Being rather old school, I know that a good help file is not at all the same as the user manual, but apparently this is no longer true. The help file is indeed the manual. Fine. Whatever. If you're too cheap to print one, at the very least you shouldn't make the customer scratch his head and poke around in order to find the user manual. Make it easy to use your product. I get much of my reading done in the bathroom, hence the stack of books and magazines. Perhaps you're comfortable with balancing a laptop at such times. I am not. Consequently, what I need is printed documentation. So, after stepping through, one app at a time, hunting down the pdf file and downloading it, I now get to print manuals out on my non-full-duplex printer. Those of you familiar with printing a 500 page manual in such a manner will no doubt have emotional scars from printing the second side only to have something get out of sync a third of the way through, forcing you to do multiple iterations to get it all done. And yes, I have nothing but free time to screw around with this stuff, thanks for asking. This is yet another example of companies making the customer do their work for free. I know nothing of Adobe Premiere, and I'm willing and eager to RTFM. However, before I can even begin learning how to use the software I just paid for, I have to jump through a number of PITA hoops that, as a customer, I shouldn't have to deal with. My point? Pushing off the work to the customer is an all too common practice today, in a great many industries, to the point where it's become standard operating procedure. Want to really stand out from the crowd, get excellent word of mouth and the loyalty of your customers? Think like a customer and bend over backwards to make their experience a pleasure, not a hassle. You'd be surprised what a huge competitive edge this can be since few companies think like this anymore.
I recently bought Scansoft's Omnipage OCR s/w on behalf of a friend via eBay. Within an hour of ordering the seller mailed me the license number, and download links for software and manual. Ten days later the package containing the CD and printed manual was waiting for my friend at her village post office in outback Australia. It's a good manual because it's written in joined up sentences, it's bathroom friendly because its A5, and its not the help text in a different form. The s/w's pretty good, just what my friend wanted and it has good help text. Business Owners - this is a good example of what we want. I suspect Christopher may have paid rather more for CS4 Premiere Pro than the $50 that I paid for Omnipage.
Multi famam, conscientiam pauci verentur.(Pliny)
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During the video upgrade of the studio, I decided to move from Vegas (I was 5 revs back) to Adobe Premiere Pro CS4. Being a geek at heart, I have a tendency to RTFM from cover to cover on new software to get a feel for the wheel. It goes without saying these days that there was no printed manual shipped, only a couple of DVDs. So, looked on the installation disk and there was no pdf documentation, nor was any installed. There was a DVD of movie tutorials, lame at best, and certainly not comprehensive. Upon further exploration, I discovered that bringing up help lead to a path where you could download the help file in pdf. Being rather old school, I know that a good help file is not at all the same as the user manual, but apparently this is no longer true. The help file is indeed the manual. Fine. Whatever. If you're too cheap to print one, at the very least you shouldn't make the customer scratch his head and poke around in order to find the user manual. Make it easy to use your product. I get much of my reading done in the bathroom, hence the stack of books and magazines. Perhaps you're comfortable with balancing a laptop at such times. I am not. Consequently, what I need is printed documentation. So, after stepping through, one app at a time, hunting down the pdf file and downloading it, I now get to print manuals out on my non-full-duplex printer. Those of you familiar with printing a 500 page manual in such a manner will no doubt have emotional scars from printing the second side only to have something get out of sync a third of the way through, forcing you to do multiple iterations to get it all done. And yes, I have nothing but free time to screw around with this stuff, thanks for asking. This is yet another example of companies making the customer do their work for free. I know nothing of Adobe Premiere, and I'm willing and eager to RTFM. However, before I can even begin learning how to use the software I just paid for, I have to jump through a number of PITA hoops that, as a customer, I shouldn't have to deal with. My point? Pushing off the work to the customer is an all too common practice today, in a great many industries, to the point where it's become standard operating procedure. Want to really stand out from the crowd, get excellent word of mouth and the loyalty of your customers? Think like a customer and bend over backwards to make their experience a pleasure, not a hassle. You'd be surprised what a huge competitive edge this can be since few companies think like this anymore.
Christopher Duncan wrote:
Pushing off the work to the customer is an all too common practice today, in a great many industries, to the point where it's become standard operating procedure. Want to really stand out from the crowd, get excellent word of mouth and the loyalty of your customers? Think like a customer and bend over backwards to make their experience a pleasure, not a hassle. You'd be surprised what a huge competitive edge this can be since few companies think like this anymore.
So why did I have to read this, shouldn't you have come around to my place and read it to me instead?
Michael Martin Australia "I controlled my laughter and simple said "No,I am very busy,so I can't write any code for you". The moment they heard this all the smiling face turned into a sad looking face and one of them farted. So I had to leave the place as soon as possible." - Mr.Prakash One Fine Saturday. 24/04/2004
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Printed Manual is no longer the norm for any software these days. If you want printed manuals you have to order separately[^] spend another $50 in addition to the big bucks you spent. It is very rare that people actually read the manuals or even the help files. I recently visited a customer site who wanted to integrate a third party software with my software. I requested for manuals or some information on the software. It turned out that the manuals (not printed) were all in Japanese. People using the software just knew how to use it even though the screens were in Japanese (though some things like error messages were in English). I was really surprised. So In some respects I understand why companies do that. The policy at my company is also to ship manuals only when requested (though we ship for free).
We have a full set of manuals for UniData (18 volumes plus one just as an index to all the others) from 1993. It cost a small fortune way back then and has hardly ever been used. So supplying the manuals at an extra cost is nothing new.
Remember, nobody ever lends money to a man with a sense of humour!
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During the video upgrade of the studio, I decided to move from Vegas (I was 5 revs back) to Adobe Premiere Pro CS4. Being a geek at heart, I have a tendency to RTFM from cover to cover on new software to get a feel for the wheel. It goes without saying these days that there was no printed manual shipped, only a couple of DVDs. So, looked on the installation disk and there was no pdf documentation, nor was any installed. There was a DVD of movie tutorials, lame at best, and certainly not comprehensive. Upon further exploration, I discovered that bringing up help lead to a path where you could download the help file in pdf. Being rather old school, I know that a good help file is not at all the same as the user manual, but apparently this is no longer true. The help file is indeed the manual. Fine. Whatever. If you're too cheap to print one, at the very least you shouldn't make the customer scratch his head and poke around in order to find the user manual. Make it easy to use your product. I get much of my reading done in the bathroom, hence the stack of books and magazines. Perhaps you're comfortable with balancing a laptop at such times. I am not. Consequently, what I need is printed documentation. So, after stepping through, one app at a time, hunting down the pdf file and downloading it, I now get to print manuals out on my non-full-duplex printer. Those of you familiar with printing a 500 page manual in such a manner will no doubt have emotional scars from printing the second side only to have something get out of sync a third of the way through, forcing you to do multiple iterations to get it all done. And yes, I have nothing but free time to screw around with this stuff, thanks for asking. This is yet another example of companies making the customer do their work for free. I know nothing of Adobe Premiere, and I'm willing and eager to RTFM. However, before I can even begin learning how to use the software I just paid for, I have to jump through a number of PITA hoops that, as a customer, I shouldn't have to deal with. My point? Pushing off the work to the customer is an all too common practice today, in a great many industries, to the point where it's become standard operating procedure. Want to really stand out from the crowd, get excellent word of mouth and the loyalty of your customers? Think like a customer and bend over backwards to make their experience a pleasure, not a hassle. You'd be surprised what a huge competitive edge this can be since few companies think like this anymore.
I see your point but I also believe there are frequent occasions where you do not need or want user’s manuals. I have work with AutoCad for over a decade and each new version came with a user manual the size of a book. I hardly ever opened them and now if I need to find something the help file with a search function is 10 times faster and it’s printable if I want to take it to the John. This is pretty much the norm in my office and now that we are moving you really do see the effects. We are recycling tons (up to 30 tons so far) of documents and manuals are easily 10% of the load. Many in the plastic cover never opened. I don’t want nor need user manuals. On whole they are the most useless reference in my opinion. If I really want to know how to use a piece of software I buy reference and instructional books. That is what on my bookshelf. That being said my user manuals are great and everyone love them. :-D
ARon
