I grew up in a large city, and when I first moved out to a small town, one of the first differences I noticed was how everyone gives directions based on how things used to be.
“You’ll turn left just past Flieler’s”, where for the last twenty years it’s been called Sunoco, or “turn just past where the Johnson’s used to live”.
If you live in the community, it still works because everyone knows how it used to be. The problem is when you’re new to the community or if you’re just passing through. Then these descriptions are just meaningless or worse time-wasting.
I’ve been reminded of this over the last few weeks as I attempt to learn Google Ads and all the documentation is very precise in telling me where menu options used to be, and how things used to work, and is absolutely useless at telling me what I need to do today.
It’s all too easy when writing documentation to treat it as one and done work. I wrote it and won’t have to change it. Yet, incorrect documentation is much worse than no documentation. If I’m driving down the street looking for a sign that says Flieler, I’m going to drive right past the Sunoco sign and not even know it.
So when we write documentation for our products, we have to also consider the cost of maintaining that documentation. It will get out of date and if we don’t keep it in sync, we are wasting our clients time and money.
I did finally figure out how to get my ads campaign running, just as I finally did figure out how to get around that small town. It just took far longer than it should have.
If we’re going to call ourselves customer focused, we need to consider how much of our customers time we’re wasting.