In order to successfully manage the large and complex sites that we use to communicate our offerings to potential students, we usually rely on a distributed network of individual content contributors. How we choose to support them – with documentation, user support, and training – directly impacts the quality of our end product website.

One of the primary purposes of documentation, user support, and training is to communicate information that a user can use to solve a problem they are having. But perhaps a more fundamental purpose is to build a positive relationship with that user so that they will continue to use our product and turn to us and our documentation into the future. Achieving one purpose – communicating information – can be one way of achieving the other, but it is far from the only way, and while it is impossible to build a good relationship without also communicating accurate and useful information, it is very possible to communicate accurate and useful information in a way that alienates, creates user distrust and apathy, and makes it more likely that users will look elsewhere for the support and information they need or simply abandon the task.

Over 18 years of delivering technical training and documentation at BCIT, I’ve become increasingly clear on the factors and structural barriers that prevent even the most well-constructed training program from working to create perfectly skilled and confident tech users every single time. They are many: users are busy, don’t get to practice their skills often enough, and fundamentally, simply forget things over time. These barriers also apply to technical documentation, perhaps to an even greater degree. Our users visit our documentation in moments of stress and to solve a problem. They’re not necessarily there to become a super-user who will never need our documentation, support, or training ever again. Fortunately, we are much less limited in our ability to build a positive and productive relationship with our users than we are in our ability to craft them into super-users. We just need to always be thinking about how we can make the process of interacting with us and using our documentation “feel good”.