Using customer input to drive change in user assistance

• Authors: Robert Pierce
• Venue: Proceedings of the 26th annual ACM international conference on Design of communication
• Year: 2008

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].