"Perhaps I'm just getting old, but that is rather confusing," one reader wrote in the Ars Technica forum thread about the release [8]. Confusion about what the feature even is, before anyone has tried to use it, is the first cost of shipping capability as plumbing, and it lands on whoever gets asked at work.
Break the Drop into doors rather than features. Keep Notes inside Messages and the new themes have a place you tap, so the internal support page for them is a screenshot with an arrow on it. The Find Hub capability, as that thread describes it, has a sentence you have to know to say [9]. Same release note, two different jobs for the person writing docs on Monday.
Teams tell themselves the natural-language door is the friendliest one, because anyone can describe what they want in their own words. Here is what a user in that thread reports actually doing: he says Android settings have long been inscrutable, so he searches the Settings app and hopes he remembers enough about whatever he is looking for to get a hit [6]. That is keyword archaeology with partial recall, and it is the habit a prompt-only feature punishes hardest, because a half-remembered fragment returns nothing and the user concludes the thing does not exist.
Worth being clear about the evidence. A comment thread tells you what a few attentive readers understood from a release note, not what a million people did with the phone. For a discoverability question that is the right kind of evidence, because the first test any Drop feature faces is somebody reading about it and then failing to find it.
The forcing function, applied line by line to the next quarterly Drop: can a support rep teach this with one screenshot, and can the data it creates be read without the assistant that took it down?
- Both yes. Document it as a feature, put it in the training material, expect questions in week one and quiet after. - Screenshot yes, assistant-only data. Document it, and write down what the user does on a day the assistant will not answer. - No screenshot, data readable elsewhere. Skip the deck and publish four exact prompts, because guessing is the failure mode you are trying to prevent. - No screenshot, assistant-only data. Leave it in the release note and call it plumbing. People who find it will find it themselves, and nobody should have to answer for it on Friday.
