Hidden Functionality: Why Bother?

This post could have had one of several names. “Hidden Functionality”, “Under-educated Users: Holding Information Hostage”, or “Getting the word out – who’s responsibility is it?” I couldn’t decide which way to go with it. The underlying idea is that there is SO much functionality in SolidWorks which goes untouched by most users. Is that because they don’t need it, don’t know it’s there or because they don’t see how it applies to them? Is the fact that some functionality never sees the light of day intentional, inadvertant or incompetence?There’s a reason why guys like me and Phil Sluder and several others can make a career of going around doing “tips and tricks” presentations at user groups and people love them. We really just show stuff that’s been in the software for a long time but has not made it into mainstream usage for whatever reason.

Ctrl-Q Anyone?

Let’s do this by a show of hands, and be honest, folks. How many people out there still don’t know the difference between Ctrl-Q and Ctrl-B? Really be honest, let’s see those hands. I still get asked this question at user group meetings. People ask the question on the SolidWorks forums. The people that visit these places are in some way connected to the rest of the community at large, but there are so many people who don’t connect at all with other SolidWorks users, and only learn what their VAR taught them, what they read in the Help, and what they can figure out on their own. There are so many sources of information about SolidWorks, that you can never hope to get all of the available info from a single source. Not even if you consider SolidWorks Corporation as a single source.

So who’s fault is it if you don’t know what Ctrl-Q does? Is it yours for not being omnicient? Your boss for not sending you to training? The training for not including it in the basic run down? Your reseller for not telling you what you really need to know to be proficient with the software? The Help? The user group? Me because it’s not on my website? Ben Eadie? Ricky Jordan? Who is responsible for getting the word out? How is the communication supposed to happen between the programmers who code the functionality and the users who use it?

To SolidWorks’ credit, I think this realization is part of the reason why they have been more supportive of user groups, and encouraging blogs like this one and many of the others on the list in the upper left of this window. But at the same time, I don’t think that they really want to communicate with users because bloggers do not have any special access to information. There’s plenty of info that users need to know which is simply buried somewhere, and we are on our own to dig it out.

Conspiracy Anyone?

I’m sure some conspiracy theorists out there probably believe that resellers are responsible for the general low level of user knowledge. After all, they are the ones in touch with the users. They know everyone who has bought the software. They have an exclusive monopoly on the dissemination of the official training materials, which are a good start, but are by no means comprehensive. Resellers make a lot of money on training. Are they holding information hostage? You already bought the software, it has dismally inadequate documentation – so what are you supposed to do? Tech suport is usually seen as a liability by resellers, and this is reflected by the general public’s cynical view of reseller tech support amounting to asking you to update your video driver. The technical raw beginners at resellers are usually the ones doing support. I’ve seen this happen from both sides of the subscription invoice, having worked at resellers for about 7 years. Resellers don’t see support as a good way of disseminating information, communicating with users or connecting with customers. Most resellers train their techs on how to get off the phone with a tech call before they train them on SolidWorks. Plus, you pay for support up front, and there is no incentive for the reseller to do a good job, and actually negative incentive to do a really fantastic job. “Tech support is not training”. Resellers will often recommend to users calling for tech support to sign up for a training class, because the question is “beyond the scope of tech support”. That takes brass balls. Reseller owners see support as a liability, and are always looking at ways to limit how much of it they are required to do. …at least that what the cynical conspiracy guys say…;oP

Documentation

To me, the responsibility to get the word out ultimately rests in the Help documentation, including the online tutorials that ship and install with the product. I don’t know if there has been some corporate directive to intentionally hamstring the Help, but if there were, it couldn’t be much more effective than the current situation. There’s not much in the software that I malign quite as much as the Help. It was the sorry state of the of the documentation in general that led me to write the SW07 Bible. So much functionality is not even mentioned in the Help, and if it is mentioned, many times it never tells you where to find the function or what the interface looks like or in a few cases, even what the function does. It is very bad indeed when they have 2 pages on a function, and at the end of it you still don’t know what it does. (Look up Update Custom Properties from the Task Scheduler for a fantastic example of awful Help).

For a period of time I wanted to work for SolidWorks in the documentation area, so I had a preliminary discussion with a manager, and came away completely discouraged and depressed. They wouldn’t want me there. I had passion, energy and ideas. They wanted a team player (read – corporate drone). I wanted to document functionality. They had a schedule that they needed to meet. I wanted to open users eyes. They had to write things that were easy to update and translate into other languages (which means no interface screen shots). I wanted substantive content. They wanted structured gloss. I guess SolidWorks is a victim of their own success. You don’t have that kind of bureaucratic problems until you get too big.

So died my hopes that the documentation would ever improve, naive fellow that I am.

I tried to talk about as much functionality in the SW07 Bible as I could. If I thought it was important, I found a way to include it. I researched tips and tricks presentations from SWWorld, resellers, user groups, what’s new presentations, newsletters, Knowledge Base, Customer Portal, individual websites, every thing I possibly could.

Who Else?