Results of a telephone survey of technical documentation users

A telephone survey is a potentially 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, we interviewed 84 individuals drawn at random from the customer list of a manufacturer of computer peripheral controllers. The sample was 96.4 percent male and included primarily programmers (33.3 percent), technicians (32.1 percent), and engineers (22.6 percent). This article discusses the responses obtained from this sample.