Back in the day, Smartly.io hired a lot of Flowdock (now defunct chat application, like Slack) employees back in the days, for example my manager. According to my understanding, this lead to flourishing usage of the Flowdock application. One of the, alleged, reasons for this was that those who had both designed and implemented the product were able to guide and educate other employees within Smartly on how to use the application to its fullest.

I have also noticed that I would gain a lot from an opinionated guide on how to use a program/application. Right now, as I am working on my Master’s thesis, I’m using Zotero for managing research. Zotero allows you to take both notes separately from a document (which then can be mapped to other notes with a “related-to” relationship) or straight into a PDF (annotations and highlights). Balancing these two features are a bit tricky, and I would love for someone at Zotero to explain to me how to “actually” use the program.

Note: I do realize that having an opinionated guide might result in some usage data being lost, as users are now following your guide more heavily. This could be mitigated by presenting the usage guide as a “design document” where the core workflow is presented. How to actually implement this is not something I’ve given enough thought.