Giving good advice (or: the view from behind the curtain)

There's a nice post up Ed Bott's Microsoft Report that talks about the bad, or at least poorly explained, advice that is given on Microsoft blogs to our users. In the example Bott discusses, the blogger tells the user to run regedit and make serious changes to the registry without having the user perform the most basic tasks, such as backing up the registry just in case, or even really explaining to the user what they should do.

I won't criticize my fellow Microsoft employee in this space. But it does give me food for thought in two ways.

First of all, I've definitely been guilty of under-explaining to users how do make fixes to problems they encounter on their machines. I tend to know my subject matter area so well, and have such a high level of confidence in what I talk about, that it's easy for me to forget to spell out certain steps. Much like a local who gives a tourist poor directions, it's easy to forget that many people just don't understand the lay of the land as well as the Microsoft person does. As an example, I was explaining to a user how to run an install off of our DVD ISO and create a verbose log. In explaining the download to them, I skipped over about three steps that were obvious to me but not obvious to them. I had to remind myself to slow down and make sure to spell everything out explicitly so that the user would actually have all the information they need to do the work.

As Bott talks about, that's part of why we have professionals do the writing for these formal docs. But blogs have an important role to play in this process, too. We're the place for immediate responses to errors, the place where we can deliver fixes to problems quickly, and revise text easily, if need be.

The second place the entry gives food for thought is in the way that we at Microsoft tend to assume that many people understand our technology in the same way that we do. It's pretty un-frightening for one 'softie to tell another to run regedit because it's just so much of the Microsoft culture to understand how to use something like RedEdit without blowing up your machine. But there are a million reasons why someone outside our company might not know this, from cultural differences to lack of exposure to simply not knowing the ramifications of certain actions. We have to remember to just be accurate and clear, let people be aware of what they're doing, or we're just asking for people to make mistakes that cause Microsoft to look bad.

By the way, if you haven't looked at the IE7 blog, I highly recommend it. They really show the way in listening to and integrating user feedback. And they show how we can better develop our Windows SDK team blog.