Scott, an ISV-entrepreneur, on BoS forum has recently complained that since their company had reached a new level of technical documentation the number of service requests grew up.
That’s an interesting effect!
Scott wrote:
Two reasons for this, based on feedback from customers seeking support:
1. Documentation is now so comprehensive that it is intimidating. People see a 1000 page manual and say “no thanks - I’ll just call customer support instead.”
2. Documentation has so much cool stuff described, that it makes people’s imagination stimulated and they start thinking of other, even more exotic stuff they want to do but can not figure out and start a service request for it.
Thus, the common solution to service requests - better documentation - actually causes more service requests, not fewer.
Is this really true and good documentation will harm to your business?
I think that only a big number of pages doesn’t mean that the manual is good. In documentation, users look for problem solutions. The more important thing than the number of pages is the structure of the manual and simplicity of search mechanisms (indexes, built-in troubleshooters, context help, etc. ).
Recently, we needed a presentational video for an affiliated service that allows health conscious people to track their diabetes, blood pressure, or body weight records and to share the results.
The main difficulty of the project was a voice-over for the video. We needed a clear, calm and native English speech but there are no native English speaking members in our team.
The two services helped us in this matter.
EditAvenue.com is a proofreading and editing service marketplace that helped us to proofread the draft of the written script for the voice-over.
If you are non-native English speaker then through EditAvenue you can access hundreds of professional editors who can correct and refine your written communication. The prices start from about $4 per page (300 words). A relatively small task may be accomplished likely in the same or next day even if you don’t pay for express delivery service.
Once we’ve received the edited script we started to look for a talent to record a voice-over for our demo. That was a problem until I spotted a link and recommendation for Voices.com on JoS boards. That’s was amazingly helpful service!
Voices.com is another marketplace where you can hire a voice artist for almost any type of job - from commercials and presentations, to cartoons and audio books. For presentations, the rates are about $300 per 5 minutes of speech.
After we had posted a job description we received about a hundred of responses with sample records in several hours. We selected a talent, made the deposit and received the final audio files by the end of the day. That was really, really cool.
I highly recommend the above services to everyone who needs to create impressive presentations for his\her products.
Here you can see the final video with the voice-over.
