Some Light Relief—Reading the Docs
How do you tell if a user has read the software documentation? If users are anything like us programmers, it's a pretty safe assumption that they have not read the documentation. Time is short, and reading manuals is tedious and time-consuming.
I once knew someone who worked on the support desk for a large internal software application. He cut his workload by 85% using one simple technique. Whenever someone reported a problem with the software, he asked them which page of the manual it violated before he would investigate it. Most users preferred to live with any bug rather than spend hours tunneling through the manual, and Perkins' technique saved him a lot of bother right up until the time he got fired. ...
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