By Rachel Andrew CHAPTER 11Strategies to Minimize Support
Collectively you can find very telling patterns [...] if lots of people are asking
where to find something then you probably have a design problem there.
— David GossProviding some amount of support is inevitable. However clear your
documentation, someone will need help to get started; however careful
your testing, some bug will slip through. So a sensible strategy for support
should also include attempts to minimize
the number of requests that come in. We
have been very successful with this ap-
proach at Perch; despite a large increase
in license sales and new customers over
the course of the past year, the number of
support tickets that we are dealing with
has remained fairly level.
How are we managing this? For Perch,
we attempt to design support requests out.
If people regularly have to request support
for a particular area of your product, is it
possible to remove or change the thing that
causes those requests, rather than assum-
ing them to be inevitable? As an example,
we were receiving a number of tickets
every week where first time users installed
Perch, reached login, and then saw the follow-
ing message: “Sorry, your license key isn’t valid for this domain.”
These users had missed the part of the email sent with their license
details that explained they needed to log into their account on our website
and configure the domains they were using Perch on. It would have been
The updated screen gives
instructions to the user.