Apr 20th, 2007
Another way to improve project-oriented software
There are many software products that have a project-oriented concept. In other words they allow creating, editing, and managing projects or documents. The examples of the project-oriented programs are various text and media editors, database systems, spreadsheets, programming tools, setup builders, knowledge bases, and a lot of other applications. I’d like to gift you an idea about how to make project-oriented programs more user friendly and easier for getting started.
If you are an experienced developer and if your product has a long history then likely you have been using the approach I’d like to tell about. As for me, I came to this feature only in the second year of the Dr.Explain’s life. So, I think there are ISVs who also might be interested in my suggestion.
The idea is quite simple. Create a sample project or a sample document in your program and install it together with your program on the user computer. On the first launch of your application, suggest a user to open this sample project. For most people it’s easier to modify an existing thing to see how it works rather than to create it from the scratch themselves. Having a sample document in your software will help new users learn you product and get started quickly.
Try to include all the key features in the sample project to immediately show the wonders your application works. If your application is too complex and may be used in different ways then it’s better to create several sample projects or documents for most typical practices.
We started distributing the sample project with a new version of Dr.Explain 2.5.93 released in March 2007. Before we did this we periodically received user messages with requests to send them the project from which we had compiled the Dr.Explain’s own help file. People wanted to know how it’s done. With the sample, they could reproduce some of our techniques in their own projects. Now, new users see the sample project in recent document list when they launch Dr.Explain for the first time and they can play with it to evaluate the program. This works great for us.
Is there a place for sample projects in your software?
