Find out how users use your documentation

Asking good questions of your users is essential to know how your customers use your documentation. This is part 2 after my post about using a survey to get to know your audience. The introductory paragraphs are identical to last week’s post, so feel free to skip ahead to the two paragraphs before the next [...]

A user survey helps you to know your audience

Asking good questions of your users is essential to know the audience of your documentation. A recent thread at Technical Writing World got me thinking about user surveys and revisiting two posts from 2010 where I wrote about obvious, but not so helpful questions and how to segment users and survey your documentation. You can [...]

Art vs. online: 2 dimensions of curating

Curating is a cool word, or trendy jargon, for what happens in web technologies and in art museums, but they are fundamentally different activities. In this post, I want to add an alternative view to Rachel Potts who recently wrote about “When software UX met museum curation“. Where Rachel emphasises similarities, I’d like to focus [...]

Proving the benefit of consistency in tech comm

To ensure efficiency and accessibility of technical communications, use consistent, common formatting, for example, for interface elements. What sounds obvious to many technical communicators is actually proven in academic studies. This post is for people looking for proof that consistency has a benefit in technical communications. I’m taking my cue from a question that appeared [...]

Framing tech comm: O’Reilly vs. Dangerfield

Technical communication is perceived in many different ways, some more constructive than others. Luckily, the framing of tech comm is the result of a dialogue/feedback loop, so we can help to shape how we come across. Tim O’Reilly on the future Consider Tim O’Reilly, quite a visionary technical communicator. He works to create “The Missing [...]

Keeping your documentation stakeholders happy

Don’t forget your stakeholders and their practices as you improve and change documentation. – That was the humbling lesson I learned (once again) as I presented our revamped documentation to non-tech comm colleagues. Reporting on progress The company I work for currently moves its documentation towards more structured writing and topic-based authoring. We’ve already rolled [...]

When redundancy is good: Online help navigation

Redundant navigation can help users find what they’re looking for. Redundancy in documentation is usually bad: When you have the same content (in different words) in two places, you pay twice for localization – yet you probably only remember to update one of the items. So you risk inconsistencies, extra costs and general havoc. Not [...]

A pattern library for user assistance

Rob Houser is working on a Pattern Library for User Assistance (UA): At WritersUA, he proposed to collect examples for patterns in (embedded) user assistance to help teams and managers with whom UA professionals collaborate to better understand the benefits and value of UA. Among UA experts, it can help to establish and exchange standards [...]

When tech comm does other teams’ work

Should documentation be expected to do the job of other teams and departments to make up for their shortcomings? That was the essential question in an interesting conversation I once had with a fellow tech writer. It’s basically a twist on the general idea that you often have to pick two of the three: High [...]

How efficient is your documentation?

To gauge the efficiency of your documentation, consider the time spent to create it plus the time it takes to use it. That’s the lesson I learned from applying Scott Berkun’s make vs. consume ratio to documentation. Scott’s idea is generally that it takes time A to create a tweet or a poem, a book [...]