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User: KeithLehman

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  1. Perfect UX a myth on Ask Slashdot: Should You Invest In Documentation, Or UX? · · Score: 1

    Trying to eliminate documentation would be a mistake, since there are few interesting applications more complicated than tic-tac-toe where one UX would satisfy all (or even nearly all) of your users. Some of us understand visuals more readily than text. Some want advanced features to be readily available while others find it confusing when advanced features are as available as those a novice user would need. How many, and how detailed are your user models? The "ideal" experience is varies from one user to the next. Documentation is one way to satisfy a wider range of users.

    Your question also causes me to believe that you can improve your team's overall productivity. Ideally, your UX does not change significantly from one year to the next. If it normally does, you are placing an unnecessary learning curve burden on your users. In that case, you need to improve your understanding of the users, and work hard to create an experience that can scale as the product features and user expertise grows. This is easy to say but not necessarily easy to do. The better your user models, the more likely you are to create a UX that really works.

    Another question that comes to mind is whether or not you are making effective use of context sensitive help. Again, depending on the complexity of your application, context sensitive help can play the role of many types of documentation. It can also be easier to reuse. Looking at it this way, effective documentation is a part of the UX, not separate. As such, your documentation needs should only be significant when market and/or the product roadmap justifies it. For example a shift from predominately desktop/laptop users to mobile/tablet users might justify major UX changes.

    Hope these thoughts help.