Scott Abel on Structured Content at TCUK12

Scott Abel delivered his keynote It’s All About Structure! Why Structured Content Is Increasingly Becoming A Necessity, Not An Option in his usual style: Provocative, but relevant, fun and fast-paced (though he said he was going to take it slow). He even channeled George Carlin’s routine on Stuff: “These are ‘MY Documents’, those are YOUR documents. Though I can see you were trying get to MY Documents…”

His style doesn’t translate well onto a web page, so I’ll restrict myself to his 9 reasons Why Structured Content Is Increasingly Becoming A Necessity:

1. Structure formalizes content, so it can guide authors who need to make fewer decisions when writing it. It also guides readers who can find more easily where the relevant information is in the whole documentation structure or within a topic. And it guides computers which can extract relevant information automatically and reliably.
2. Structure enhances usability by creating patterns that are easy to recognize and easy to navigate with confidence.
3. Structure enables automatic delivery and syndication of content, for example, via twitter – and you’ll be surprised occasionally when and how other people syndicate your “stuff”.
4. Structure supports single-sourcing which means you can efficiently publish content on several channels, whether it’s print or different online outputs, such as a web browser, an iPad or a smartphone.
5. Structure can automate transactions, such as money transfers, whether they are embedded in other content or content items in their own right.
6. Structure makes it easier to adapt content for localization and translation, because you can chunk content to re-use existing translations or to select parts that need not only be translated but localized to suit a local market.
7. Structure allows you to select and present content dynamically. You can decide which content to offer on the fly and automatically, depending on user context, such as time and location.
8. Structure allows you to move beyond persona-ized content. This is not a typo: Scott doesn’t really like personas. He thinks they are a poor approximation of someone who is not you which is no longer necessary. With structured content (and enough information about your users) you can personalize your content to suit them better than personas ever let you.
9. Structure makes it much easier to filter and reuse content to suit particular variants, situations and users.

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Ray Gallon’s Hairball of Content at TCUK12

Ray Gallon‘s session The Hairball of Content was a high-level tour de force where he argued that we technical communicators do much more than just technical writing. However, we rarely get credit for all the other work we do in tasks such as content strategy, user interface design, information architecture, etc.

Assisting the user

Our overarching task is to assist users by translating the functional thinking of engineers into something that users can act upon and experience. That means our content is not just in the documentation, but it’s also in the user interface, in the error messages, etc. So technical communications accompanies the complete design process – and we tech comm’ers need to be involved from day one.

If we take our role as the users’ advocate seriously, we need to tweak some of our dogmas a little to ensure that users get the maximum benefit.

Embedding fosters knowledge

Concepts as documentation content are not an end in itself, but they need to offer decision support to users. A concept should tell readers whether they are looking at the right tool or function at the right time. That means such conceptual information needs to be available right where it matters. Even if it means to give context with conceptual information inside a procedure topic, either in the introduction or even as a short sentence in the individual step.

Yes, such mixing of topic information goes against the rules of topic-based authoring, but it will actually help users: Offering such mixed information in context transforms the sheer information of how to do a task  (which is hard to remember) to knowledge of why and how to do a task (which is easier to remember.)

Context is everything

Ray said: “Context is everything” – which applies across the board:

• User assistance needs to be available in the context of the user’s workflow. Embedding contextual information in layers, from GUI labels via tooltips to full-blown help topics, will support users accomplish their tasks faster and more easily without taking more of their attention than necessary.
• Each piece of user assistance also needs to offer sufficient context to be meaningful and “learnable” for users: Only offering steps 1 through 5 in a procedure usually doesn’t offer enough context for users to actually learn how to use a product or a function, if we omit the “when” and the “why”.
• User assistance also needs to offer enough context to allow users to navigate easily and with confidence through the product and the documentation. Specifically, we need to offer users an easy way back to where they’ve come from and a way back to the product and their task.

Offering successful user assistance isn’t a question of offering more at all costs, because more information isn’t necessarily better for the users. Instead, we need to stimulate cognitive demand, the will to know and learn, in the user by offering the right information at the right time.