Your Customers Don’t Care About Your Product’s Features
They want to learn solutions to their problems. And outcomes.
Maybe they bought because of all your wizzy features, but now they have to use it. And probably the people that have to use it aren’t the same as the people that bought.
When they set about to learn how to use your product, they’re not thinking in terms of individual features.
They’ve got problems. Lots of problems.
And they’re looking for answers.
Yet so much documentation and training focuses on the features, and explaining features to the nth level of detail. And companies think that by explaining those features in depth they’ve given customers the tools to effectively use it.
It doesn’t really work that way. At least not if you want your customers to learn effectively and be successful with your product.
Think about those Ikea instructions we all love to hate.
When you open them up, are you looking to learn more about the storage features in your Tonstad bed? About how nicely the drawers slide in and out and can store the equivalent of a full-sized Husky? Nope.
You have a problem. You need somewhere to sleep tonight and you need to get the damn bed put together!
And those instructions are your solution to not sleeping on the floor.
It’s a simple mind shift that can make your documentation and training materials, be they written or video, infinitely better. Just ask yourself: What are the problems my customers are trying to solve? What outcomes do they want to achieve?
So instead of a video on “Understanding Reports,” you get a video on “Create a Report to Track Your Inventory.”
And instead of organizing topics and videos by feature, organize them by outcome, or by the problem people are trying to solve. So don’t put your “Create a Report to Track Your Inventory” video with all the other report videos, put it with the other videos that help them manage and track their inventory.
Problem -> Solution -> Outcome.
Focus on what your customers are trying to achieve, not what your software does.