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    New Series: Organizing Content [Organizing Content 1]

    Monday, May 17th, 2010 Posted in blog | Comments Off

    I'm starting a new series on organizing content. I'm not sure how many parts there will be in this series. Writing essays in a serial format is an experiment I'm exploring. Basically this approach to writing follows the agile model. I write a bit, get some feedback, write some more, get feedback, and keep going. The feedback along the way shapes the direction I'm heading. Also, with each serial post, I hope to take the ... Read more..

    Introducing Project Swordfish [Organizing Content 2]

    Monday, May 17th, 2010 Posted in blog | 5 Comments »

    Welcome to the new project you’ll be documenting: Project Swordfish. Project Swordfish is an application used by the FBI to train agents in virtual simulations of undercover operations. With Swordfish, users can be super agents and regular agents. The super agents can configure the permissions of the regular agents with 20 different permission settings. This means the relevant help topics for any agent can vary from about 10 topics to all 200 topics, depending on the ... Read more..

    Things Fall Apart, The Centre Cannot Hold [Organizing Content 3]

    Monday, May 17th, 2010 Posted in blog | 25 Comments »

    Let's fast forward a year. Assume you have explored Swordfish and have hammered out a lot of help topics -- nearly 200 help topics, in fact. You have met with subject matter experts and extracted critical information from them for many months. You have explored Swordfish inside and out, documenting every possible task and setting, and now you have a ton of content. The help topics you created seem endless. You have checked their accuracy against ... Read more..

    Imposing Order Versus Observing Order [Organizing Content 4]

    Tuesday, May 18th, 2010 Posted in blog | 12 Comments »

    It’s easy to postpone organization. We begin writing discrete help topics, hundreds of them, and then try to group them together in a logical way. But here’s where the problem starts. What does it mean for a system of organization to be “logical”? And how does the user navigate this logic we create? Our system of organization partly determines the findability of the content. Without findability, we might as well not even write help at all. ... Read more..

    Topic-Based, Hierarchical Navigation [Organizing Content 5]

    Wednesday, May 19th, 2010 Posted in blog | 32 Comments »

    I mentioned that topic-based, hierarchical navigation, which is the standard for 95% of the help files I see, is becoming a tired, less-than-useful navigation system. We rely on this system too much as technical writers, and it's not that helpful to users. Here are a few examples to demonstrate this. I read an intriguing article today called 5 High Paying, Low Stress Jobs on Yahoo Finance. It lists technical writing as the fifth least stressful, high-paying ... Read more..

    Faceted Classification, Faceted Search [Organizing Content 6]

    Thursday, May 20th, 2010 Posted in blog | 20 Comments »

    In the last post, I argued that topic-based navigation systems generally fail for users. Topic-based navigation has some merits, such as allowing users to see topics in context, to discover other topics through browsing, and to provide one perspective on the organization of the material, but topic-based navigation shouldn't be the only means of navigating the content. Another way to allow users to find your content is through faceted classification and faceted search. Read more..

    Implementing Faceted Classification/Search with a Help Authoring Tool [Organizing Content 7]

    Friday, May 21st, 2010 Posted in blog | 23 Comments »

    In my last post, I presented faceted classification and faceted search as an alternative method of organization for help content. While faceted navigation systems are common on the web, implementing a faceted navigation system to describe help content using one of the common help authoring tools, such as Flare, RoboHelp, Author-It, Doc-to-Help,  is more challenging. Read more..

    Second-Level Faceted Navigation [Organizing Content 8]

    Tuesday, May 25th, 2010 Posted in blog | 2 Comments »

    In my previous post, I introduced faceted classification and faceted navigation as alternative methods for organizing help content. In contrast to topic-based hierarchies, faceted navigation provides multiple paths into the same content. These multiple paths increase the likelihood that users find the right content. Peter Morville and Jeffery Callendar, two information architects, call faceted navigation "arguably the most significant search innovation of the past decade." Because of its importance in content findability, one aspect I want to now explore further is ... Read more..

    Browse Versus Search: Stumbling into the Unknown Unknown [Organizing Content 9]

    Wednesday, May 26th, 2010 Posted in blog | 9 Comments »

    So far I've been writing about alternative ways to navigate help content. The other day I was talking with my colleagues about some of these ideas, and one colleague said, You know, when it comes down to it, most users will search for what they're looking for rather than try to browse a system of folders anyway. I will admit that we're a search-driven culture. Our fascination with Google is that it seems to contain answers to nearly ... Read more..

    Figuring Out Search Algorithms [Organizing Content 10]

    Thursday, May 27th, 2010 Posted in blog | 2 Comments »

    In my last post, I argued that navigation systems can't be entirely discarded in favor of search, because navigation helps users discover the unknown unknown. But now that we've covered navigation systems a bit, it's time to move on to search, because search is undoubtedly a major way that users navigate help content. How can you organize your content so that the topics are findable in search? Notice that I said "organize." You're still organizing your ... Read more..

    Search Engine Optimizing Your Help Content for Google [Organizing Content 11]

    Friday, May 28th, 2010 Posted in blog | 10 Comments »

    In my last post, I argued that making content findable in search engines requires you to understand how your search engine algorithm ranks and sorts the content it indexes. Not all search engines work the same. Some rank content through links, others by date, others include index keywords, and so on. You have to be familiar with the search algorithm so that you can maximize your content's visibility in the search. I touched briefly on Google's ... Read more..

    From Help Authoring Tools to Web Tools, Especially Wikis [Organizing Content 12]

    Thursday, June 3rd, 2010 Posted in blog | 6 Comments »

    Yes, I am continuing this series on Organizing Content, so if you are tired of it, check back in a while. My goal is to reach 100 posts on the topic. An Electricity Fast First, a brief bit of news. All the lights in my house are off because Jane wants to do an electricity fast. It's a Thoreauvian experiment to see what you gain when you give something up. For the past couple of days I've been moving ... Read more..

    Using Mediawiki Templates to Organize Content [Organizing Content 13]

    Wednesday, June 9th, 2010 Posted in blog | 4 Comments »

    In my last series post on organizing content, I argued that traditional help authoring tools will be replaced by web platforms suitable for authoring help content. Web platforms have many advantages over help authoring tools. They provide everything from search engine optimization to interactivity and social media integration. Some of the more common HAT features, such as single sourcing and print, may not be as important in the future, since the long printed manual is ... Read more..

    The Semantic Web and Content Findability: Interview with Patrick Warren [Organizing Content 14]

    Thursday, June 10th, 2010 Posted in blog | 2 Comments »

    In a previous comment, Larry Kunz wondered if the semantic web might be useful in helping users find the content they're looking for. I decided to ask Patrick Warren to write a guest post on the semantic web based on questions I asked him. There's a lot of material to ingest and think about in Patrick's responses. It definitely get the ball rolling in a new direction for this series. What's your current role and job ... Read more..

    Faulty Assumptions About the Scope of Help Content? [Organizing Content 15]

    Friday, June 11th, 2010 Posted in blog | 20 Comments »

    I’ve written more than a dozen posts in this series on organizing content. Until now, I've been working under the assumption that if the help content were just organized well, if it were findable by the user, in an intuitive, accessible way, then it would solve much of the problems of help. I’ve been assuming that the problem is one of findability and organization. The help content is there, but it’s so buried, so impossible ... Read more..


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