Here’s a technique I find works well. Start with the premise that every day, some new thought will strike you as being intriguing. When that moment occurs, write a descriptive word on your hand.

Later that evening, type a couple of paragraphs explaining your thought. Usually as you write, more thoughts come.

Now that you’ve trained your brain to be aware of these subtle moments of insight during the day, you’ll experience them more frequently. The trick is to keep posting often. Remember, blogs are basically thought journals. Let the journal sit too long, and you start thinking that you have to have a monumental epiphany to start writing.

Other Blogging News

While I’m on the topic of blogging, today I read a great quote by Guy Kawasaki. He says,

A blog is written by someone with nothing to say, writing for someone with nothing to do.

I’m sure he’s saying this tongue-in-cheek, because in a previous interview with Brian Oberkirch, he said he wanted to spend his time with only three things: his family, hockey, and his blog. Plus he has an extremely popular blog.

Blogs are also moving up in importance for Google, who will be including blogs in its Universal Search results. Read the story here.

The Real Problem

The real problem isn’t that people believe no one uses help, but that no one finds help useful. Most people are too tactful to say this outright, but it is a distinction you might raise: “Did you mean no one uses help, or that no one finds help useful?” The answer is probably both: people don’t use help because they don’t find it useful. And the more help isn’t useful, the less people use it.

Pyramid of Results

The “Pyramid of Results” (what I’m calling it) explains the root of the problem clearly (see graphic). Experiences are the foundation of our beliefs. Beliefs give rise to actions. Actions lead to results. Here’s the key:

If you want to change the result, you have to change the underlying experiences behind the result.

In other words, you can’t convince people that help is useful unless you change their experiences using help.

I once read that every poor help file is a black eye to the profession. I didn’t entirely understand that at first, but now I do. It means that even when engineers in other countries write terrible help documentation, though it seems unrelated to my products, life, and experiences, it actually drives the general experiences users have with help, solidifying in their minds the idea that all help is useless. Since help is useless, it’s unlikely that people use it. If people don’t use it, it’s not significant. Experiences form the basis of their beliefs. So as excited as I may be about my help file, I’m fighting against a mountain of poor experiences that users have had with other help files.

We have to change people’s experiences with help if want to change their belief about its usefulness.

My Plan to Change Perceptions

We can turn the tide of this thought, but it will require radical changes. It won’t be enough to merely provide well-organized, accurate, grammatically correct help. Help has to go above and beyond the mark of helpfulness. It has to be so good that it blows people away, that it gets your attention in a shocking way. People use the help and their jaw drops because … because … all the answers are there, in just the format you want. It’s simply awesome. It teaches you everything you need to know, right when you want to know it, concisely.

A Challenge for Creative Innovation

Although we sometimes think our field is dry, technical, and just a day job, if someone can figure out how to make help whallop the user with wonder and awe, it will be the creative innovation of the century. Once we begin to establish a standard and a precedence, people’s beliefs will change from feeling that “all help is useless and unimportant” to “the help at my company is exceptionally good and useful; I will explore it more often.”

Such a radical shift in help might have the following help characteristics:

• Audiovisual options for each topic (screen demos)
• Excellent search and index — searching for a word finds the topic
• Personalized help for your role and job title
• Ability to provide feedback to the help authors, to contribute, or otherwise interact
• Cheatsheets, cue cards, quick reference guides, and other handy references you can print
• Abundant visual displays of processes, workflows, procedures, and other eye-catching diagrams
• Help that calculates and aggregates the most popular topics based on number of times viewed and searched for
• An active, engaging blog about the product integrated with or beside the help
• Download options to load help content onto your iPod, BlackBerry, or other device
• Live chat support
• Holographic images of a friendly person explaining (with gesticulations) help concepts (I’m kidding here)

What do you think? What would help need to have to change people’s experiences for the better?

According to Vitruvius, a new crown in the shape of a laurel wreath had been made for King Hiero II, and Archimedes was asked to determine whether it was of solid gold, or whether silver had been added by a dishonest goldsmith.^[11] Archimedes had to solve the problem without damaging the crown, so he could not melt it down in order to measure its density as a cube, which would have been the simplest solution.

While taking a bath, he noticed that the level of the water rose as he got in. He realized that this effect could be used to determine the volume of the crown, and therefore its density after weighing it. The density of the crown would be lower if cheaper and less dense metals had been added. He then took to the streets naked, so excited by his discovery that he had forgotten to dress, crying “Eureka!” “I have found it!” (Greek: “εύρηκα!”)^[12]

The story about the golden crown does not appear in the known works of Archimedes, but in his treatise On Floating Bodies he gives the principle known in hydrostatics as Archimedes’ Principle. This states that a body immersed in a fluid experiences a buoyant force equal to the weight of the displaced fluid.^[13]

Berkun says we tend to mythologize geniuses because we need the story, and he references Joseph Campbell’s myth of the hero. Most of these stories turn out to be factually false. Geniuses don’t just pull ideas out of the sky with mere luck. They spend their lifetimes reflecting and thinking and pondering about these topics. Whether they do it in a bath tub or while eating in an apple orchard, the brilliance doesn’t come from chance. It is the result of a life immersed in thought and experiment.

Recommended Scott Berkun Podcasts

Check out these podcasts on Berkun’s site:

• The engaging brand, with Anna Farmery (40 minutes, in two 20 minute mp3 segments)
• Interview w/ Matt Mullenweg, founder of WordPress.com, about Myths of Innovation (15 minute mp3).
• IT Conversations about Myths of Innovation and software development (60 minute mp3)
• What to do when things go wrong, at BayCHI, San Jose CA. 90 minute mp3
• Digital web magazine, 5 questions w/Scott Berkun