3 motivators you share with your tech comm readers

What motivates you to work most likely motivates most of your users in their jobs, too! You still need to know your audience, their tasks and background, but the good news is that you have some basic motivators in common. And these can help you understand what makes you happy at work – and what makes your users successful in their work with your documentation.

The three motivators

I take my cue from Walter Chen’s post “The science behind what motivates us to get up for work every day“. I want to focus on three motivators Chen quotes from Daniel Pink:

The 3 real reasons that motivate us to work hard every day

Pink explains … that there are in fact just 3 very simple things that drive nearly each and everyone of us to work hard:

1. Autonomy: Our desire to direct our own lives. In short: “You probably want to do something interesting, let me get out of your way!”
2. Mastery: Our urge to get better at stuff.
3. Purpose: The feeling and intention that we can make a difference in the world.

The motivators for technical communicators

Pink’s model resonated with me, and I think this is exactly what motivates me to do good tech comm work and try to get better at it:

• Autonomy for me means to find something good in the benign neglect that often meets my efforts. Of course, I have specific products, deliverables and deadlines to comply with, but our documentation team is lucky enough to be able to define its own standards and processes as long as they’re feasible.
• Mastery is the challenge to write better documentation. When I revisit obsolete documentation that I’ve written some years ago, it makes me smile: Seeing where I’m coming from and what I wouldn’t do anymore gives me a sense of progress. I’m still using task orientation and topic-based authoring – but I wouldn’t awkwardly mix concept and task in the same topic like this anymore.
• Purpose for me is my reward that my readers can be more successful or simply faster in their work if and because I’ve given them the right information at the right time.

So in a very personal, non-scientific way, I could validate these three motivators.

The motivators for documentation users

I don’t think I’m all that different from my readers in this regard. I believe they get motivated by the same things – they’re just in a different job.

So I try to keep in mind the motivators when I structure and write my documentation:

• Autonomy is tricky, of course. Someone looking up documentation has just given up the autonomy of a self-directed life and needs instruction or information. But I still try to acknowledge this and follow Pink’s advice above: “You (dear user) probably want to do something interesting (or important), let me (give you what you seek and) get out of your way!”
• Mastery is where tech comm can really excel. By presenting essential information concisely and clearly we can make it easy for our users to master their tasks and their use of our product. For this mastery, it doesn’t matter whether users learn from the documentation and internalize a skill or whether they simply know where they can look up again quickly what they don’t need to remember.
• Purpose is frequently neglected, I think. Often documentation focuses on the how, and forgets the why. But there is no sense of purpose without a why. Granted, not every topic can address the big questions of life and the universe. But as long as there is an elegant and possibly noble reason for why our product and its tasks are this particular way, it’s worth sharing it. It will give our customers an extra motivation – and make them more loyal users.

Is this what motivates you? Does it work for your readers or do they have other motivations? Please leave a comment.

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How meaning works in technical communication

Considering how meaning works in communication in general, it should be easy in technical communication in particular, because several parameters are fixed.

Last week, I asked whether we actually create meaning in our documentation. Today, I take a closer look at semiotics to find out how meaning is created in communication – and specifically in techcomm.

How meaning gets transmitted in communication

Semiotics is a theory that explains communication as the production of meaning between people who exchange messages in cultural contexts. Semiotics aims to explain how communication is meaningful for a reader. (For much more on semiotics, check out Daniel Chandler’s good introduction Semiotics for Beginners.)

Note that the reader is not just a passive recipient of the message, but the active participant who constructs the meaning of a message. That is not to say that the meaning is whatever the reader wants. Rather, the meaning arises from how readers interpret the signs according to shared common conventions. For example, a user will – more or less – assume that a user manual contains photos or schematic images that represent the layout of the product, not an ideological statement, and try to create meaning accordingly.

Semiotics can get quite complex, due to all the moving parts:

• Signs, such as words or even images, can lend themselves to creating different meanings at different times or for different groups of readers. (Think of ideologically, religiously or politically charged words or images.)
• Semiotic “codes” can make you feel a member of the group, like your own regional dialect, or they can exclude you, like academic jargon. Whether you feel included or excluded influences your understanding of the message and the meaning you take from it.

However, technical communication suffers less from these shifts and ambiguities, because a lot of our signs and codes are restricted and well-defined. Or are they?

Why meaning seems easier in tech comm

Much technical communication can avoid some of the semiotic pitfalls because it addresses a limited, rather homogenous audience. We can assume a general willingness to learn the applied “code” of descriptions and instructions such as a user manual contains it. A manual can presuppose a certain vocabulary or define it in its glossary. The context is confined to the intended tasks of the products, and the expected outcomes of the tasks should be clear.

With all these major restrictions on communications in place, the user’s path is confined to a tunnel, and all that is left for the manual to do is to put in some lights and a railing to safely guide the readers through.

– If it was that easy, we wouldn’t find meaning in technical communications so elusive – and we wouldn’t despair to get users to follow the documentation. So our daily experience tells us that it doesn’t quite work that way.

– I’ll explore this problem at my presentation “Addicted to Meaning: How Good Technical Communication is Like Bad Magic Tricks” at tekom/tcworld in Wiesbaden on Tue 23 Oct at 1:45 pm. In the meantime, feel free to leave comments or questions below.

But do we create documentation with meaning?

Being meaningful is an essential, but elusive feature of good technical communications. Yet being meaningful in technical communications is just as essential as being correct and clear, concise or consistent: Understanding how and why communication is meaningful can help you to make your documentation more effective and to make your product more useful.

What is meaning?

Information theory suggests a hierarchy of information which proceeds from data at the bottom via information and knowledge to wisdom at the top. For example:

• Data is the sheer fact that the Microsoft Office 2007 software has an “Office button” icon in the upper left corner.
• The information is that this icon gives you access to functions such as opening, saving and printing a file helps you with generic functions.
• The knowledge is that this functionality has replaced the File menu you’ve been used to. This adds meaning and supports your active experience.
• The wisdom might be in the affirmation that nothing lasts. Or that Microsoft has flipped-flopped when they abolished something as sensible as the File menu – only to bring it back in Office 2010…

So meaning occurs at the knowledge stage in this hierarchy when you make sense of data and information, when you “connect the dots” into something that you can apply purposefully. Meaning gives answers to questions such as “So what?”, “What does this mean for me, in my situation?” and “Why should I care?”.

Why should technical communicators care?

Technical communicators should care about meaning, because we are in the business of creating meaning and transmitting it to users. We can provide all the data and information we want, if it’s not meaningful to customers, it’s wasted and dead. Any time documentation fails, it’s either because meaning has not been created or not been transmitted successfully. Documentation that merely informs the user “To print a file, click the Print button” does not support any active experience. It does not create any meaning, if it omits the context, such as the task the user may be engaged in, the prerequisites and the expected results of the user’s action.

– How can we ensure that our documentation is meaningful? Should we be thinking about meaning explicitly? Or is it enough to know our audience, use personas and create task-oriented documentation? Feel free to leave a comment.

TCUK12: Internationalisation as an accessibility issue

Addressing internationalisation and accessibility issues are two complementary ways to make technical communications (as well as products and web sites) more inclusive. Attend a panel discussion at TCUK in October to find out what pitfalls internationalisation and globalisationcan bring and what others have done to address them.

The panelists

The panel brings together four internationally experienced technical communicators:

• Karen Mardahl is TCUK’s keynote speaker of this year’s accessibility stream. She believes in encouraging technical communicators to develop their skills and knowledge to strengthen their role in any organisation, but especially to do their part in making products and services more inclusive for all people. Living and working in Denmark, she has experienced the subtle challenges of negotiating technical communications in an international, intercultural context first-hand.
• Robert Hempsall is a specialist information designer whose international clients, such as international airlines and telecommunicartions companies, require forms, bills and letters designed for efficient localisation and maximum accessibility.
• Ray Gallon is currently an independent consultant, specializing in the convergence of user guidance and usability for international companies such as General Electric Medical Systems, Alcatel, and Ilog-IBM. Ray is currently a member of the international board of directors of the Society for Technical Communications (STC) and past president of the STC France chapter. He shares his life between the Languedoc region of France and the city of Barcelona, Spain.
• I will be moderating the panel and insert the occasional anecdote or lesson learned from my experience of 13 years of writing software documentation in English that is accessible and useful for users all across Europe.

The topics

The focus of the panel will be a dimension which frequently shuts out wide ranges of customers and users: National borders and the languages and cultural conventions they denote. Internationalization is an accessibility issue in user interfaces and documentation. In several ways, it affects whether you can reach your customers and how well.

For example, in documentation (and user experience design as a whole), language can be:

• Inclusive when it is comprehensible to customers who speak English as a Second Language
• Exclusive when it relies on specific cultural conventions, idioms or references, including common items, such as date and time Readability can be

The presentation of examples and entry forms can be:

• Inclusive when they support different international conventions
• Exclusive when they are limited, for example, to 5-digit zip codes

How to distinguish corresponding strategies?

• Localization: The adaptation of product and documentation to a specific market, a locale.
• Internationalization: The presentation of product and documentation that enables efficient localization in different cultures and languages.

Our panel discussion discusses these issues and more with examples and suggestions how to make technical communications more inclusive in terms of language and culture and hence more successful internationally.

If you know additional questions or topics of internationalisation as an accessibility issue, please leave a comment.