Honestly, Phase One leaves me speachless at times with their decisions or processes. Links to some sort of "Notes" system on one's favourite internet access devices could make a very powerful tool compared to printed documentation.
That said, an extension to the C1 User Account that provided a personal "Notes" area that linked to Community Knowledge Centre articles, forum posts, etc., could be quite useful. on the other hand most of them would now be for products I never use so that's not a real problem. The trouble is that these days I can rarely find them. Over the years for many products I have made a lot of notes. However, to those of us with a "User Guide" background and perhaps an "off line" reading preference, the online solution does not always appeal. The searches potential make things far more accessible with faster discovery. And broader support can be made available by offering links to seemingly related documents either pre-curated or via a search constructed from user input.Īll of that has the potential to be much more effective, efficient and no more costly to the producers than printed documentation. Usually additional visual support - videos for example - are also created where they may be of special use. With today's "agile" development enabling quite frequent changes (not many of the fundamentally changing the most used functionality but still significant in for some people) suppliers have sought to reduce costs (and print waste, especially when there are not even disks to put in a box!) but enhance information availability by making support online friendly. Prior to ubiquitous internet access at decent access speeds there were few alternatives even when PDF started to become "a thing".
That helped to justify the cost of printing, etc. The thing is that back in the day the product - even software - did not really change much during a release and people would be unlikely to buy new versions more than every 2 or 3 years so the documentation (even though rarely read in my experience sitting on the supplier side for some business software) at least had a life.
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