Engaging and working on Ideas using Salesforce

Use Case

I was answering this question End user adoption/understanding in Stackexchange and thought of having this use case. 

Usually the project team has an idea and they build a few features, alerts, dashboards, etc.

Yet, vendor often see that end users do not always understand everything we built. Vendor has noticed that his notes/guides tend to be somewhat technical, but maybe he should build some sort of knowledge base that tells the user 'alert 1' does XYZ.

How do you tackle it?

Probable approach

1. If vendor has an idea then post this idea in chatter and get votes on this idea. Also, vendor should make sure users are adopting Chatter quite well, otherwise, ideas will not reach to the broader audience.
2. Before actual implementation, vendor needs to engage your user on what you are planning to implement and how business will get benefited (either by, improvement of productivity, cost etc.)
3. Show and Tell approach - Vendor can create a mock application to show customer and get customer's feedback and confidence.
4. After implementation, vendor should create a Knowledge article, so that business can understand the effective use of the use case or need. Knowledge article should be readable and sometimes use of context sensitive pictures and flow charts helps users the understand the context.
5. Easy access to the Knowledge article, so that when customers need it they will have it.
6. Engaging them in Chatter when vendor comes up with this implementation.
7. Taking feedback periodically, how Customers are using this feature and what's their suggestions for future improvements.
8. Build continuous improvement process at your organization.