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Comment by efitz | Hacker News Reader

You need docs. Most users won’t read them. Do a good job anyway because they can save you a TON of support costs if they’re good, even for the few people who do read them. The cost of writing docs is easily offset by even a modest reduction in human support cost, unless you just half-ass your support with LLMs and FAQs and chat with overseas wage slaves.

ALSO: your UX needs to warn people about sharp edges and one-way doors, BEFORE your user commits to an action they might regret. These are not incompatible.

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If nothing else, the "smart cows" will read the docs and may even help out on support forums when some of the user base doesn't and decides to complain. Docs are good for everyone and will save time internally and externally.

>your UX needs to warn people about sharp edges and one-way doors, BEFORE your user commits to an action they might regret. These are not incompatible.

Assuming trump doesn't nix it, the recent FTC ruling should fix this by itself. it should be as easy to unsubscribe as it is to subscribe.

I don’t think easy unsubscribe falls under «sharp edges and one-way doors». But high friction unsubscribe probably goes hand in hand with sharp edges and one-way doors at those lead you to want to unsubscribe…therefore they make it hard.

Docs are a great defense against clients that demand hand-holding, even if nobody ever actually reads them. If they ask a question covered by the docs, simply point them at the docs and they'll go away indefinitely rather than read something.

My point is that the clients that matter will require hand-holding.

Sure if you just sell to hobby programmers and students it’s no problem. But if your customers should be real businesses - in my experience 90% of them require a lot of handholding, you literally have to read the docs for them and tell them in a call.

Even if no one reads docs up front - having some documentation to point them to is a must.

I cannot imagine making stuff up all the time as you go. Maybe if system is super small. But then even better to build up documentation to have it for later.

Clients that won't use the docs and need handholding can pay for service: sell them training, and you can use the docs already written as the training material.

Also, it's pretty easy at this point to setup an AI support agent that can reference your docs, and it is a helpful exercise for organizing your own thoughts and being able to communicate them back to yourself. There's not really a good reason to not have good docs.

I just assume that if a product is gated behind "let's hope on a call!" it's still vaporware and there's a 50/50 chance that they'll pivot within a few months.

They also are great for the support team, to "educate" where they can find additional info and for linking as help links if the interface needs this.

Also docs can be effective for marketing especially if you sell bottom-up to devs. If i visit a site and see a section for docs, it means they are catering to my needs

You definitely needs docs, they are just as important as the product.

But thinking all your prospects will read the docs is a fallacy- maybe 5% of prospects fall into the category of OP, more commonly they won’t even know what their own requirements are, let alone how to map that to your product/docs

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