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Systems that Get Better the More People Use Them
June 12th, 2008 | Posted in Recom. Podcasts, Technical Writing, Web 2.0 |
In Publishing 2.0, Tim O’Reilly says Web 2.0 is “any network effect that makes a system better the more people use it.” Web 2.0 isn’t just user-generated content; it’s harnessing the collective intelligence of your users to make your system better.
O’Reilly’s definition is intriguing because it’s the opposite of the natural law of use. Your car doesn’t get better the more you use it. A music track doesn’t get better if more people listen to it. Your bank account doesn’t improve as more people use it. Your feet don’t get better the more you use them. Very few things actually get better the more you use them. Not Web 2.0. It’s almost paradoxical. The more people who use it, the better it gets.
O’Reilly gives two main examples:
- Google. With Google, every time a user makes a link to another site, Google uses that hyperlink to better inform its search algorithm.
- Amazon. Borders and Barnes & Noble have the same stock of books, but Amazon integrates user reviews and commentary to add more value to their literary collection. With each review, the site gets more valuable.
O’Reilly also mentioned eBay and Craigslist. With each system, the more people use it, the better it gets. O’Reilly also has interesting research on publishing and digital libraries, but I’ll save that for another post.
The question for technical writers is not how you can enable user-generated content with your help, but how you can make your documentation better as more people use it.
I wish I could say I have lots of cool ideas on how to do this. I don’t, maybe you do — refine search results based on user queries, allow users to comment on topics, sort topics based on popularity of views, enable users to contribute their own topics, configure search results based on topic viewing time, provide user community, yada yada yada.
These ideas aren’t new or particularly interesting. Partly it’s because they’re still so pie in the sky, how- -do-you-even-do-it type features. Next I’ll suggest telepathically downloading hotspots in user-brains to note the kinesthetic, verbal, or auditory preferences of your users based on the lobes that light up.
Yet we’re at a point technically where many of these features exist or are available. Our problem is that most help authors aren’t programmers, and few programmers get jazzed about coding help tools. When’s the last time you saw an open source help authoring tool that was specifically designed to create help systems?
(Okay, I did see one last week — called PHP Manual Creator, but it looked really primitive.)
In contrast, look at the explosion of social networks, blog platforms, video sharing tools, and countless other killer web 2.0 apps. Inevitably, help systems will also migrate more towards O’Reilly’s idea of Web 2.0. But rather than seeing these blow-your-mind-web-2.0-type tools emerge from the help developer community (i.e., all those companies who advertise in Intercom), I think the next-generation tools will come from web developers and designers who create them for another purpose. We’ll simply repurpose them to deliver help content.
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- Content Management Professionals — Interview with Scott Abel
Tags: Amazon, craigslit, ebay, Google, it conversations, o'reilly, open source, php
June 13th, 2008 at 1:15 am
Tom, thanks for raising some very interesting questions!
I guess part of the charm of O’Reilly’s definition is that it implicitly conflates use and care (rather than wear). Using a Web 2.0 system, it gets better because users take care of it while using it, whether they contribute actively or indirectly, automatically. (Never mind remuneration for these services…
).
And speaking of music: Yes, a canned music track doesn’t improve with use - but a song will when it’s played live and exposed to a community of fans and caretakers. I’m thinking especially of jamband phenomena…
When it comes to making documentation better with use, I think the ideas you point out are all practical in their own contexts. And I would add good old interviewing users to see if they find the help useful and how it could be improved as well as tracking click paths through a system to see what paths users actually take.
However, I think on a larger scale it has less to do with tools and techniques, but rather with the users and how they can achieve what they want or need to do. So maybe it’s as simple as *allowing* users to improve the documentation to their needs. I’m still feeding off of Scott Abel’s idea of allowing users to help one another at 2:30 in the morning.
I would also argue that O’Reilly’s examples translate badly to most of us technical writers: Google, Amazon and eBay all have sooo much traffic to play with and try out all kinds of improvements. For every example mentioned, I’d bet there’s five that have fallen by the wayside because they didn’t work due to failing technology or faulty premisses.
Speaking of oodles of users: What does Microsoft do to have their users improve their help? Anyone know?
June 13th, 2008 at 7:03 am
Kai, Thanks for your comment. By the way, this time I think you unchecked the Commentluv check box, and so that faulty link didn’t get pulled it.
Re Microsoft, supposedly they track user behavior (if you allow it). That’s how they discovered that most people only use 20% of the features in Microsoft Word. They used this behavioral analysis to come up with the Ribbon.
It’s not an automated example, and it leans more towards user analysis. The better web 2.0 examples are when a system automatically gets better from user additions.
June 14th, 2008 at 1:47 am
thank you…
July 14th, 2008 at 1:17 pm
Microsoft gets user input different ways. Each product is pretty much in charge of its own system, though there’s communication between divisions. Office has the best feedback mechanisms, because their Help is almost entirely online–they can get the usual Web statistics and easily collect comments. In Developer Division where I work (Visual Studio, .NET Framework) we have offline, local Help plus an online version on MSDN. Online, people can rate topics and leave comments. The writers look at the ratings and they also get every comment assigned to them in our work item tracking system (though this is pretty recent).
We also have the MSDN Wiki where people can add comments. Last February I went to a conference and videotaped interviews with our customers talking about how they used the product and how they got Help.
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