Using customer input to drive change in user assistance

ABSTRACT

If designing and developing optimal products, services, and information requires clarity and audience awareness, then developing ways to acquire customer input is a critical piece in the best development workflow solutions [43]. Seeking direct input from customers and learning how they use a product are the most effective methods for generating ideas for enhancements and innovations to the technical content that supports a product, as well as to the product itself [21].

Taking the steps to create opportunities for customer feedback enables direct customer input and establishes the proactive best practice of demonstrating to the customer that they are a top priority in the product development focus [34].

While there may not be a fixed agenda for an optimal customer meeting, there may, in fact, be a set of topics for discussion that comprise a set of best practices for gaining customer input for the user assistance [45].

Customer input helps provide requests for change and thus aids in managing change, raising the importance of a change and requirements management system [34, 52]. A change and requirements management system is even more critical in the context of application lifecycle management and globally distributed development [27, 49, 50, 55].

Managing relationships with customers leads to a two-way path for collaboration, both for helping customers solve their problems and for a company to enhance its products and overall success [26, 28].

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INDEX TERMS

Primary Classification:
  D. Software
  D.2 SOFTWARE ENGINEERING
      D.2.7 Distribution, Maintenance, and Enhancement
          Subjects: Documentation

General Terms:
Design, Documentation, Standardization, Theory

Keywords:
computer documentation, customer feedback, information, outside-in development, software documentation, user assistance