I’m back in the saddle after camping and then participating in a pioneer handcart trek reenactment last week. The world at work moved on without me, but not far enough that I wasn’t able to get back into things quickly.

A program manager and I were helping some users today when he talked about getting their feedback on aspects of the design that don’t work for them; for example, we have a page in the application with a lot of text boxes, and in order to save page scrolling, these text areas were designed to be three lines high. Therefore, if there are more than three lines of text in a box, scrolling that box becomes necessary. The users were accustomed to seeing all the text at once on paper, so they wanted the same thing on the screen.

The program manager told them that their feedback would be taken into consideration for enhancements in future releases. This made me ask myself when it’s better to enhance the product or simply explain the current state in the documentation. Where’s the line?

A coworker who used to be a technical writer once gave me a pin he received at a conference. The pin reads: “NO. You can’t just explain it in the manual.”

The point is that documentation shouldn’t have to make up for lack of design. However, there are probably some cases where adding some information to the documentation instead of changing the product makes more sense. Cost of doing one or the other is certainly an important consideration. The degree to which the enhancement would relieve user headaches is another.

Where only one of the two is needed, how do you make the determination whether to enhance the product in a certain way or instead add to the documentation?