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Is Your Phone Ringing? Reduce Your Support Volume by Teaching Customers with Examples

RDR
NI Employee (retired)

Teach Customers with Examples

I cannot stress enough how important it is to provide examples for your customers!  As an engineer, I’ve taught myself dozens of concepts by first working through examples and then applying what I learned through practice.  Taking this approach to other challenges, I’m sure all of you will agree instructions are always important when you purchase a new desk, printer, automobile, or some other product which requires a bit of a learning curve on your end before you’re successful with it.  Think of example code, walk-throughs, and getting started guides as instructions for using your software products.  Let’s take a look at how this applies to a LabVIEW toolkit…

Getting Started

When I install a new LabVIEW toolkit, the first thing I’lldo is look for a “Getting Started” guide or some documentation catered towards a new user of the product.  This guide should begin by providing me with general setup or installation steps – even if I ignore the guide until after installation, I’ll often review the installation steps to see if I’ve overlooked anything important.

Product Overview

Next, I expect to see an overview of the product – for LabVIEW toolkits this could include an overview of where the palette is located and how it is organized, whether or not context help is available for the toolkit, how to find a more detailed help document, the location of example VIs, etc.

Context Help

Then, as a user, my next steps would be to explore the palette, open the help document, and eventually open and run example code.  How can you ensure I am successful once I go off on my own?  Direct me to your detailed help document for your VI’s context help and perhaps documentation to accompany your LabVIEW example VIs. 

Example VIs

What should you include in your example VIs themselves?  Examples should demonstrate how to use your toolkit in typical use cases – take NI’s DAQmx driver for example, there are a seemingly endless number of examples in the NI Example finder for a wide variety of data acquisition tasks.  While you probably won’t need as many examples as DAQmx provides, at least provide examples for common use cases for your customers.  These examples should demonstrate how you believe your toolkit should be used in a clean and easy to follow programming style, and with detailed supporting documentation (use free labels!).  Customers will then review this code and reuse the concepts they’ve learned in their own applications.  Good example code can help the success of your product by increasing the confidence of customers in your products, reducing the amount of support you must provide for new users (wouldn’t it be nice to just point someone to an example and have them off and running?), and reducing the amount of support for advanced users as they quickly become experts on using your product!

More Information

Please refer to the following document on the LabVIEW Add-on Dev Center for more information about creating examples: http://decibel.ni.com/content/docs/DOC-13544

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