WinWriters is pleased to announce the results for the first in a series of surveys designed specifically for the European User Assistance community. These results provide a summary view of several important aspects of our work.

The European User Assistance Survey form was published on the WinWriters web site in late March 2003 for a ten-day period. We received a total of 156 responses from Austria, Belgium, Denmark, Finland, France, Germany, Iceland, Ireland, Italy, Norway, Slovenia, Sweden, Switzerland, The Netherlands, and the United Kingdom. Most of the responses were from the UK.

Enjoy the information—we hope it is useful to you. Please send us any feedback you have on the survey or the analysis. We look forward to your contributions to future surveys.

Our Products

Although we're all involved in supporting software development, there are many different product categories within the software world. We asked what product categories respondents support; they could select more than one item.

As shown below, Business Products is the area with the most involvement for us. This includes workplace productivity tools for accounting, project management, and inventory control. These tools are developed for a diverse audience of retail and wholesale customers.

Our User Assistance

We asked what user assistance components respondents currently distribute. The top recipients of votes were Acrobat PDF and Printed Documents, as seen in the figure below. This matches the results in our WinWriters Skills and Technologies survey.

Acrobat PDF has always been useful for providing an online version of legacy printed documentation. It is a cheap and easy way to deal with technical specifications and other types of reference materials that are not key elements in our documentation set. However, more and more organizations are using PDF for single-sourcing printed manuals to the Web.

Printed Documents was in a close second place to PDF. It is clear that we are not ready to eliminate paper-based content. A printed manual provides an implied sense of higher quality customer support. Also, some customers are more comfortable finding information in a printed manual.

The Microsoft Help standards are still widely used. However, cross-platform, Browser-based Help systems are quickly becoming a preferred delivery method. Browser-based Help can take the form of HTML files locally installed on the client along with the software. Alternatively, it can be served via the Internet/intranet from a remote location.

Our International Presence

We asked respondents about the geographic scope of their product distribution; they could select more than item. Almost all of the respondents, 92%, identified the European Union as an area of distribution, as seen in the figure below. This was followed by support for your Own Country and then North America. Two-thirds of the respondents support Asia and Other European countries. Other Regions are supported by 59%.

Looking at the overall results to this question, the European software development industry has an extremely high level of support for customers throughout the world.

A natural corollary to international support is to translate products and user assistance into different languages. We asked how many language respondents support with their documentation. As shown below, 39% of respondents support only one language in their product documentation; 47% support three or more languages. It is likely that these two groups of user assistance developers have very different work experiences. Translation has an enormous effect on the development process and project management.

When working with multiple translastions and globally distributed products, command of more than one language can be very helpful. We asked how many languages respondents speak fluently in addition to their native language. As shown below, 41% were fluent in no other languages. However, this group was predominantly English-speaking United Kingdom respondents. Just over half of the respondents spoke one or two languages in addition to their native language.