Task Focus Can Be Tricky
I was pretty happy with some progress we made today. Just before we took copies of the current version of the docs for an upcoming release, I reviewed the What's New topic (almost the only new content in the doc set--it's very early in the cycle) and decided we had blatantly failed to orient it around customer concerns. The writer, Norm, said he had the same thought.
Oh, we had made it scannable and highlighted the important words and used a bulleted list. It looked nice, and it looked easy to get information. But the information was feature names, followed by brief descriptions of what the features do. Our goal had been to highlight what you can DO with the new features.
We were OK on the heading for the section, and even on the introductory paragraph. It was just when we got to the details that we shifted from task to feature, because we were distracted by an appearance that looked usable. We just forgot to think about whether the content was usable too.
Fortunately, we fixed it two hours before the deadline.
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