Results of a telephone survey of technical documentation users

A telephone survey is a potential effective way to learn the preferences of technical documentation users. The sample must be carefully selected, however, to ensure that it is representative of the customers who will be using a given category of products and manuals. Surveys of two different populations of computer manual users have been shown to yield conflicting results. In one such survey, 84 individuals were interviewed that were drawn at random from the customer list of a manufacturer of computer peripheral controllers. The sample was 96.4% male and primarily included programmers (33.3%), technicians (32.1%), and engineers (22.6%). The author discusses the responses obtained from this sample.