STC13: User Assistance, Tech Comm, and Learning

The session “User Assistance, Tech Comm, and Learning” brought together four seasoned professionals to discuss common grounds between tech comm and e-learning: Nicky Bleiel, who moderated, Kevin Siegel, Saul Carliner, and Matt Sullivan. (This is part of my coverage of the STC Summit 2013 in Atlanta.)

The panel, moderated by Nicky Bleiel. Photo by @viqui_dill.

Saul’s opening statement pointed out important differences between tech comm and training:

• Tech comm doesn’t aim at information retention, but training does.
• Tech comm’ers mainly create content, but trainers mainly teach, whether online or “in real life”.

Yet there are large overlaps between the disciplines and their practice, especially in “informal learning”, specifically, in the purpose, the content, and the consumer’s awareness of learning.

Kevin added further common values and features which both share:

• Brevity in topics, in e-learning lessons (typically less than 5 minutes), or in a video (less than 2 minutes)
• Step-by-step instructions in task topics and lessons
• Direct address of the user as “you”

Matt explained how he focused on pragmatic information delivery where his single-sourcing workflow almost automatically combines “teaching and telling” in documents.

In the discussion that followed, the panelists addressed further aspects of that intersection of tech comm and training:

• By emphasizing user action and tasks over functionality descriptions, you can offer resourceful users interactions and showing and telling to mix and match. However, exactly targeting your audience always precisely is usually not possible (neither in training nor in tech comm), so resist the temptation to “helicopter-parent” your learners.
• That intersection works well with thought-through minimalism (which is not the same as writing in a concise manner).
• Selecting the right channel and format can benefit both purposes, tech comm and training, tremendously, whether you choose videos or interactions or text.
• Sample projects can be helpful to support and illustrate both,  learning and, to a lesser extent, documentation. They can be used as templates for a quick start to explore user scenarios. Personas are a great idea, too, but they’re of limited value as long as they don’t support the person(a)’s task.

In closing, the panelists pointed out that the focus of tech comm and e-learning alike is on people, not theories, methods or tools. In either domain, all users are different and many are extrinsically motivated by policy, law or certification to learn. So make it easy on them and keep them moving along swiftly.

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