Companies spend so much time, money and effort trying to understand and quantify what their users are saying and thinking about their products. In software development, UI design receives hyperfocus and in hardware or devices, testing and usability receive a good portion of time and budget (not to mention focus) during the development stage.
Much to my dismay, documentation is still perceived as a separate entity from the product. R&D budgets for the project rarely include documentation. Instead, it gets tacked on at the end as an afterthought, a necessary evil. I keep rallying against this because I continue to believe that this is a critical product, project and R&D failure. We may call it documentation, but it’s actually part of the product. If you use the product wrong, it's a bad product. If you have to spend time looking for instructions, rather than having some integrated knowledge base or easy to find button, the product is not as good as a product that is easy to use.
Thought of differently, it's not documentation. It's knowledge. Separating it from product development or from R&D either mentally or in real terms is a critical mistake, and one which has a direct and negative user experience impact.
My friend Doug Levy just co-authored a brilliant piece (which I encourage you to read) in Advertising Age Magazine. Doug points out that brand and advertising are part of the actual product; if you make a brand claim that isn't part of your product, you damage your reputation and in fact, damage the product. It's the same for product documentation or product knowledge.
