People are generally bright when it comes to technology in a certain sense: You give them a product, and they may or may not use it for what it was created for. They use it to meet their needs. If the intended use and the need happen to coincide, then you’re a step ahead.

Constant Reinvention

I received an email recently from Twitter saying that they made some changes to the service that reflected some unexpected ways that people are using it. People have taken even something as simple as 140-character micro-blog posts and taken them in directions the creators didn’t anticipate.

It reminds me of Legos. You used to be able to get Legos in huge buckets that could keep your kids busy for hours, days, weeks … However, Lego sets gradually became more and more specialized. The buckets allowed people to do all kinds of things with them, things the creators of Legos may never have imagined. Even with the specialized sets, some kids can probably get pretty creative. (By the way, I’m told that those buckets are becoming available again.)

As another example, take a cardboard box. If you’re familiar with Bill Watterson’s comic strip Calvin and Hobbes, you know that the same cardboard box can be a transmogrifier, time machine, and cloning/duplicating machine. The manufacturer of the cardboard box intended it to be for holding things, but Calvin found other uses for it because his imagination led him there.

People are inventive, and as we all know, this inventiveness comes from necessity. Humans are masters at improvising. If you don’t have a fly swatter handy, you whack that pest with a rolled-up magazine or a shoe. We reinvent things on the fly (no pun intended) to solve immediate problems.

Who’s Learning from Whom?

What does this mean for technical communication? We write documentation based on what products are built to do and the tasks that we expect users to perform with them. But what do we do when users are finding their own uses for the products we write about? How much should we care?

Thanks to the Web and people’s willingness to post tips and tricks they’ve discovered, you may be able to find out the ways people are using your product that you didn’t consider. Or perhaps you have a user forum or wiki where you can observe users talking to each other or contributing their tips to each other. Silently observing users work in person can be another way to find out the unique ways they use the product.

The Impact

I think awareness of consumers’ innovative uses of our products is important for a few reasons:

• If new uses are legitimate and safe, you can document them. This adds to the product’s perceived and actual versatility and usefulness and therefore adds to its value in the marketplace and the chances of gaining customers. As a result, customer loyalty to the organization increases.
• Legitimate and safe uses can be improved in future development and advertised as features, again increasing value and customer base. And just think: You’re the one who is bringing in these attractive enhancement ideas.
• It may be that users find uses that are not recommended for one reason or another. In this case, you may want to add warnings or cautions to your documentation rather than additional tasks. They may need to be added to the product itself. This may be important for making things safer for users and also protecting your organization legally.

Wrap-up

Keeping track of how inventive people use your product may be a key to your contribution to the bottom line. As a technical communicator, you are in a prime position to find out how the organization’s expectations for use differ from use in the real world.

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