Yesterday I had a meeting with some managers about a series of quick reference guides that I had been preparing. If you remember, much of my callout post referred to a strategy about callout design. It was the same project. (The team actually went with bubble callouts rather than my minimalist callouts, but that’s another story.) During the meeting, as the team looked at the … more »

In this ongoing series on organizing content, we’ve shifted from organizing help outside the interface to organizing help inside the interface. Moving help inside the interface has many advantages, and there are plenty of best practices for style and format. But the biggest shift in perspective, which I argued in my last post, is to stop differentiating between the interface and the help content. The … more »

Being boring is sin #3 in my list of the seven deadly sins (other sins include being fake, irrelevant, unreadable, irresponsible, unfindable, and inattentive). Perhaps a more tactful way of saying something is boring is to say the writer neglects to “keep the audience’s attention.” I’m always hearing about the short attention spans of online audiences, that readers only skim your content and spend a minute … more »

One of the fundamental aspects of quick reference guides is knowing when to create them. A few weeks ago I was assigned to a small project team working on a relatively simple application, and I pitched the idea of several role-based quick reference guides for the help content. I showed samples from other projects, and the project team agreed it was what they wanted. Soon … more »

Twitter, often referred to as the water cooler of the Internet, teaches us the art of brevity by limiting communication to 140 characters or less. But unless you can compress instructional content in ingenious ways, you’ll find Twitter limiting as a method for delivering documentation. Instead, Twitter is better used for the following: Eavesdropping on customer conversations Putting a personal face on your company Increasing … more »

How many times have you written a 75+ page guide and heard the customer say, This is great, but can you give us a condensed version? After the third or fourth time I’d heard this, I decided to actually try it. I wasn’t sure exactly how to lay it out, so I spent a couple of days flipping through magazines — especially WIRED — looking … more »