Article originally written by Hannan Saltzman, Zoomin Software, October 10, 2016
With permission, adapted by Debra Johnson, Manager – Technical Communication.
For years, companies have been turning to that old standard format – PDF – “Portable Document Format” to publish product documentation…and while technical communicators have been arguing, begging, and threatening for this to change… old habits and mindsets die hard.
Thankfully, as far as customers are concerned — and mercifully, as far as Technical Communicators/Writers are concerned — a growing number of companies are seeing the light and realizing that, while PDFs still have their place on the communication landscape, product documentation is not one of them.
In this article, we highlight the five key reasons why companies that refuse to say farewell to PDFs for this purpose may be invariably saying goodbye to potential customers:
1. User experience with PDFs is dreadful
According to the evidence-based user experience research, training, and consulting company Nielson Norman Group, there is one – and only one – valid reason for companies to use PDFs: it makes life easier for customers to print documents that may be too-large-for-comfort to read on screens.
For everything else, PDFs commit a series of unpardonable “usability crimes” including:
- Documents in this format rarely follow guidelines for web writing as authors write for print vs. web
- The user experience is jarring since PDFs live in their own environment with various commands and menus
- Crashes and software compatibility problems are common – and can be too complicated for less tech-savvy customers
- Documents can take too long to download and navigate because they’re often large, and over-loaded with graphics and space-hogging style elements
- Documents are typically optimized for paper – not scrolling – which results in all kinds of rendering issues, including extremely tiny or distorted fonts
- Documents lack internal navigation, which means customers rarely find the answers they need quickly, easily, or in some cases, at all
Jakob Nielson, Ph.D., a User Advocate and principal of the Nielsen Norman Group, which he co-founded with Dr. Donald A. Norman (former VP of Research at Apple Computer), established the “discount usability engineering” movement for fast and cheap improvements of user interfaces and has invented several usability methods, including heuristic evaluation. He holds 79 United States patents, mainly on ways of making the Internet easier to use.
According to Dr. Nielson, “Users get lost inside PDF files, which are typically big, linear blobs of text that are optimized for print and unpleasant to read and navigate online. PDFs are good for printing, but that’s it. Don’t use it for online presentations. Users hate PDFs.”
2. PDFs are not cheap – even if they seem that way
Many companies that still use PDFs for product documentation point to the fact that they are cheap and easy to create… or so they say. After all, why invest in a new product documentation distribution system when good ‘ol PDFs are doing the job?
But that IS the problem: PDFs ARE NOT doing the job. We’ve already highlighted why customers hate PDFs. But CEOs, CIOs, and CFOs shouldn’t be fans either, because contrary to popular belief, PDFs are not a cost-effective solution. Since documents are static snapshots, maintaining and updating them is very time consuming, which translates into excessive labor costs and inaccurate information out with the reader. What’s more, the updating process can be riddled with errors and inconsistencies, leading to re-work – and yet more labor costs.
3. PDFs do not drive self-support
A survey by digital marketer Steven Van Belleghem found that 56 percent of customers prefer self-service options when conducting pre-sales research, and 48 percent of customers want self-service options when addressing post-sales issues. And along the same lines, the Aspect Consumer Experience Index found that 65 percent of customers feel good about a company and themselves when they can answer a question or solve a problem on their own.
However, because PDFs are “big, linear text blobs”, customers invariably run into obstacles sooner or later. When (not if) this happens, they have no choice but to open a support ticket or call a support agent – which, according to survey done by Nuance Communications®, is a step that 59 percent of customers find frustrating.
4. PDFs do not deliver actionable intelligence
PDFs fail to deliver what may be more valuable to some companies than revenues: actionable intelligence into how customers are behaving, what they’re thinking, and what they want. At most, companies can track the number of downloads, which is about as meaningless as capturing generic website visitor numbers.
5. PDFs are not SEO-friendly
Research done by communications agency Fleishman-Hillard found that 89 percent of consumers turn to Google, Bing, and other search engines to get information on products and services prior to making purchases. Unfortunately – and contrary to what many companies believe – PDFs aren’t very SEO-friendly.
Yes…as long as the content was created as a text document and not an image, PDFs can be indexed. But the entire PDF will be indexed as a single URL, even though it may contain numerous distinct sections that should be indexed as separate web pages. While this may improve over time, this ultimately makes content far less discoverable and accessible. Google® can index Adobe PDFs, but it actually does not like to. PDF documents do not have the HTML tag structure that informs Google what it is about and helps to rank the content for target keywords. Thus, PDF files can confuse Google’s search engine, which in turn prefers keywords and text-heavy documents over PDF ones.
What’s more…customers, who do in fact see a search result link that promises to give them the answers they want, must start from the beginning of the PDF rather than being taken to the specific section or topic that interests them. For very small documents this may not be an issue, but for larger documents, it is clearly a problem.
The Bottom Line
As we noted earlier, PDFs still have their place on the communication landscape, and the original authors of this article certainly aren’t calling for their extinction. For example, there are some valid PDF applications, such as specific files that are meant to be used as tools (e.g. excel spreadsheets), contracts, or educational material that must be printed in a specific format (i.e. the documents aren’t meant to be accessed through a browser, but rather printed on paper).
However, when it comes to product documentation, PDFs are clearly part of a problem rather than the solution. They frustrate customers, exasperate technical communicators (writers), and rather than being cheap and effective, they’re costly, inefficient, and incapable of delivering actionable intelligence. That’s the bad news.
The good news at my company is, we are working to change mindsets. We are working to dynamically create, publish, and update content across all product lines, and to gain content-driven analytics, which we can use to support customer success, drive sales, reduce support costs, and increase profitability.
We want to say goodbye to PDF “linear text blobs” as product documentation, and say hello to providing answers, quicker enabling us to get closer our customers than ever before…aligning all of our content along the customer journey.
REFERENCE:
https://www.nngroup.com/people/jakob-nielsen/
https://www.searchenginejournal.com/8-tips-to-make-your-pdf-page-seo-friendly-by/59975
http://searchengineland.com/are-pdfs-optimal-for-seo-182076