Last night I saw a presentation from Rob Hinchcliffe, a community strategist, in which he discussed how Netflix had disrupted the TV market with its decision to start making its own content. I wondered if Netflix's action might have some bearing on the future of user assistance.
Unlike the traditional TV networks (and film producers as well), Netflix can track and analyse, in minute detail, the behaviour of every person who watches a programme on its service. The rumour is that Netflix used its “big data” to decide what would be the best programme to make for its audience. According to Salon's Andrew Leonard:
For at least a year, Netflix has been explicit about its plans to exploit its Big Data capabilities to influence its programming choices. House of Cards is one of the first major test cases of this Big Data-driven creative strategy. For almost a year, Netflix executives have told us that their detailed knowledge of Netflix subscriber viewing preferences clinched their decision to license a remake of the popular and critically well regarded 1990 BBC miniseries. Netflix’s data indicated that the same subscribers who loved the original BBC production also gobbled down movies starring Kevin Spacey or directed by David Fincher. Therefore, concluded Netflix executives, a remake of the BBC drama with Spacey and Fincher attached was a no-brainer, to the point that the company committed $100 million for two 13-episode seasons.
This puts Netflix at an advantage to other programme producers. Often, TV networks have to make educated guesses on what to shows make. According to Allison Willmore, while US TV networks traditionally order a show based on whether it likes a pilot, Netflix ordered two full seasons (26 episodes) of House of Cards without seeing a single scene.
What has this got to do with user assistance?
The more we understand about our readers, the more likely we are to produce documentation they'll love.
From a business perspective, wouldn't it be great to know that customers in New Jersey were 70% likely to upgrade to the premium version of your product after they had read the Help topic on, let's say, configuration?
In some cases, unfortunately, technical publications teams are more in the dark about their customers than the TV networks. I've interviewed many documentation managers and pretty much all of them were confident they were producing content that met the users' needs. Few, however, talked to their customers, and hardly any knew how many people had read their documentation in a particular week (and whether it had answered their questions).
Analytics, and Web analytics in particular, can help us get to the position of the TV networks. We can see how many people have read a particular topic, we can measure how many people have downloaded our documents, and so on. This information is useful in measuring the demand for technical documentation—often you'll find it's the most popular content on your company's Web site.
What if we wanted to get to the level of understanding and insight of Netflix?
We could require users to login to see the information, and be able to track them once they've logged in. However, that could hide our information from Google, and people might go elsewhere. As a compromise, we could put some of our information in the public domain and some inside a login area.
Another alternative is have your Help inside a user community platform, where users create profiles and have to login when they want to add comments to Help topics. You'll get data on some of your customers (those who register and add comments), and they may be representative of all the users.
However, if we really want to get close to the richness of information that Netflix has, we probably need to be looking at offering our product as Software as a Service. With Software as a Service, in most cases, users login to a Web-based version of your application. This means you can track the behaviour of individual users – who reads the Help and when, what they do next, and so on.
What information do you have on your users? How can you measure if you're meeting their needs? If you have adopted a Software as a Service model, have you gained a better understanding of your users? Use the comment box below to share your thoughts.
Ellis Pratt is sales and marketing director at Cherryleaf. Ranked the most the influential blogger on technical communication in Europe, Ellis is a specialist in the field of creating clear and simple information users will love.