Today, enterprises and consumers alike, expect to try out your software (or online service – see note 1) hands-on before making a purchase decision. Thus, the necessity of Product Evaluation Guides that:
- Get prospective customers up and running with your software as quickly and as easily as possible.
- Give positive, low-risk product experiences, so prospective customers have the confidence to start tackling real problems with your software — all prior to purchase.
- Make it clear how the software is better than the competition’’s.
Sounds simple enough, but many Product Evaluation Guides fail due to simple mistakes. Here are the three most common mistakes that product marketers make when writing Product Evaluation Guides:
1. Not providing detailed-enough step-by-step instructions.
I’ve seen too many Product Evaluation Guides with hyper-brief instructions like: “1. Create a new project. 2. Create a new workspace,” without any explanation about HOW to do these tasks.
Where’s the icon the user should click to create a new project? What should the user input into each field in the “New Project dialog box” that pops up? What’s a workspace anyway? Explain please. Otherwise, the user will get frustrated and conclude your product is unusable, when in reality it’s just your Evaluation Guide.
Remember, most users of Product Evaluation Guides are unfamiliar with your product and your lingo, because, after all, indoctrinating those unfamiliar users is the main purpose of your Evaluation Guide! Assume they have scant knowledge of your product or similar ones.
2. Not providing context or explanation about why these are the steps.
On the flip side, I’ve seen Evaluation Guides filled with detailed, step-by-step instructions — but they never explain WHY these are the steps. This leaves the reader uncertain about how to apply the same “step template” to his own problem. What parts of the instructions are “template” and applicable to other similar problems, and which parts are specific to just this example? The user is left guessing, frustrated, and unable to move forward with using the product to solve his problem.
One way to remedy this is to smartly divide the document into sections and sub-sections of related steps. At the beginning of each sub-section, briefly explain the high-level process and why these are the steps. When describing each step in detail, note if this particular step is specific to this example and how it would be changed for other situations. And finally, at the end of the section, recap why these were the steps and provide some more context about how to adapt them if necessary.
3. Including too much marketing-speak.
It’s very tempting to load up a Product Evaluation Guide with lots of puffery and claims of your product’s status as the “leading high-performance platform for scalable, synergistic ,and secure social networking” (or something like that).
However, remember your goal is to get the user successfully using your product — hopefully with his real-world problems — as quickly as possible. Marketing-speak slows the user down. It requires him to use too much of his brain to understand what you are saying — brainpower he could have applied to using your product and figuring out how he could apply it to his own situation. Plus, many of today’s users are just turned off by the usual marketing blah-blah and will think less of your product for using it.
Note that by “Marketing-speak” I am not referring to “good marketing” language the clearly states what your product is, what it is not, its benefits, and its unique differentiators. I mean language that – intentionally or not – is buzzword-laden and ambiguous.
Conclusion
Writing a great Product Evaluation Guide can be a tricky business. But if you keep the main goals in mind and avoid the three common mistakes, you’re on your way.
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Note 1 - To avoid awkward language in this article, I use the term “software” generically to encompass online services, enterprise software, and consumer software.
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