Ask Slashdot: Should You Invest In Documentation, Or UX?

New submitter fpodoo writes "We are going to launch a new version of Odoo, the open source business apps suite. Once a year we release a new version and all the documentation has to be rewritten, as the software evolves a lot. It's a huge effort (~1000 pages, 250 apps) and it feels like we are building on quicksand. I am wondering if it would be better to invest all our efforts in R&D on improving the user experience and building tools in the product to better help the user. Do you know any complex software that succeeded in avoiding documentation by having significantly improved usability? As a customer, how would you feel with a very simple product (much simpler than the competition but still a bit complex) that has no documentation?"

Re: You're doing it wrong.

[Fabien Pinckaers]

We actually have four documentations: developers, community (how to contribute), designers (how to develop theme), users (accountant, crm, point of sale, ecommerce, ...) The first three are stable enough and we will for sure invest in a great documentation. But the latest, the business apps, will evolve a lot in the coming months as they are plenty of areas to improve. My question relates only to the user documentation. For developers and designers, we more or less freeze the api/interfaces.