Designers recognize the applicability of the 80/20 rule on design. Heat maps show that people only focus on about 20 percent of the page. This is where good designers will focus their energy.

Webdesign Depot explains:

Assuming this is a good indicator of where a user’s eye is focused, this supports the concept of the 80/20 rule. The most intense areas on the map could represent the 20% of the page that the user’s eyes interact with 80% of the time.

From that knowledge, as designers, we can make decisions that will help enhance and optimize the areas that the user is going to be habitually drawn to. (The 80/20 Rule Applied to Web Design)

How it affects help content

If this rule indeed holds true, how should the 80/20 rule affect the help content we create?

All too often we treat software documentation on a topic equality basis. Every topic usually gets our full attention and care. We slog through one topic after another, moving slowly but surely as we prepare our help system.

Instead, why not figure out the 20 percent of topics that most users will be interested in, and then pour the majority of our time into developing content for those topics?

For these high-use topics, we could add screenshots, videos, quick reference guides, FAQs, and more. Figuring out these topics is to identify the core — the beating heart — of the help content.

To increase the visibility of these high-use topics, we might also put links to these top 20 percent topics on the homepage of the help, or in special portals. This way if we don’t have context sensitive help, users will get to the information they need.

If only we knew …

But you may object that it’s only in hindsight that we can identify of our most influential topics.

This is true, but perhaps this is where the real change comes. I noted a few months back that we approach help authoring backwards. In a phased approach, the first release of help might contain a text-only skeleton of help content. The second phase, after you identify the frequently accessed topics and questions, could contain more multimedia and visuals.

Regardless of the approach, my point is this: I spend far too much time creating content no one is asking about. I should instead focus our time and energy on the content that matters.

A few more 80/20 applications

The 80/20 rule is such a fun rule, though. Why stop here when there’s so much more territory to cover? Here are a few more possible applications of the rule.

During your 8 hour day at work, you accomplish your most influential tasks in about 1.6 hours. (This is probably the time you actually spend writing, while the rest is taken up by meetings and other distractions.)

Although you put in hard work throughout the year, only about 20 percent of your effort makes a difference, while the rest goes unnoticed.

80 percent of the effect comes from just 20 percent of what you say. A full five minutes of praise followed by a brief but bitter and cutting negative remark sours all the positive.

A page with impressively written instructions but which is missing a critical step makes the entire procedure baffling and the experience negative for users.

In a blog post of 1,000 words, only 200 will be memorable.

80 percent of the funding in your department probably goes toward 20 percent of the products.

20 percent of your products probably make 80 percent of your company’s profit.

80 percent of the book you’re reading will be a waste of time.

80 percent of your time spent on the project will be in useless meetings. Except that a few key meetings, maybe 20 percent of them, will make meetings worthwhile enough that you can’t miss skip out on them entirely.

Of the 10 tweets you post, 2 of them get retweeted a ton of times while the rest fall into thin air.

Twenty percent of the blog posts you write will garner 80 percent of the traffic, while the rest languish unread.

80 percent of your team’s output comes from just 20 percent of your employees (don’t fire those ones).

A novelist who writes 8 novels really only gets notoriety for 2 of them.

A musician who becomes famous is recognized for her 2 songs, while 8 of the others are easily forgettable.

20 percent of your child’s activity will lead to 80 percent of your headache (e.g, screaming. jumping).

Your users will probably only use 20 percent of the features in your application.

80 percent of the calls to the support desk will be about 20 percent of the features of the application.

Those short few words of praise when you’re critiquing someone’s writing mean more than 80 percent of anything else you say.

I probably only use 20 percent of my English vocabulary, but I use these words 80 percent of the time.

My wife is right about 20 percent of the time, but her aggressiveness and memory helps her seem like she’s right 80 percent of the time.

At conferences, 80 percent of the sessions you attend will be mediocre; the 20 percent that you do attend will be memorable and worthwhile.

As a breadwinner, you’re gone from your family most of the time, but that 20 percent of the time you’re at home counts for about 80 percent of your influence.

20 percent of the punctuation marks available to you are used 80 percent of the time. (Think about the comma and period, rather than the colon, semicolon, dash, and ellipses.)

20 percent of your users give feedback, but their feedback influences 80 percent of the product decisions with the team because these users are so vocal.

20 percent of the tech comm gurus are responsible for 80 percent of the influence in the industry.

20 percent of what you eat contributes to 80 percent of your weight.

20 percent of your brain contributes to 80 percent of your thought.

20 percent of your dates contribute to 80 percent of your children.

Okay, I’ll stop.

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A lot of people feel the same way about videos. In a recent post, Kristi Leach explains an attitude she once held about instructional videos:

I rarely appreciate video instructions, either–they take too long, because I’m pausing, following the step, playing, pausing again. I was having trouble imagining how videos were going to improve our help systems or fit into our schedules.

For Kristi, prior to her turnaround screencast moment, videos seemed to take too long and were difficult to follow along with in a step-by-step way.

When you write a script for a video (or when you create a general outline), you can avoid the problem of the eternal video — which I refer to as a sense of rambling — by simply keeping the video short. Don’t try to cover too much ground. You can generally speak about 100 words a minute, so keep that in mind with your script. 200 words is a good length.

If you don’t believe me, when you watch videos, look at the video’s time counter and note when you start losing your attention. My patience times out at about three minutes. So I always try to keep my videos at three minutes or less.

Video Length

Guidelines for video length are somewhat controversial. Part of the problem is that video content varies dramatically. If you’re watching an episode on Hulu.com, that’s different from a humorous clip on youtube, which is also different from an instructional video about a software application.

Video2zero conducted a study and found the “ideal run-time for web video 2.5 – 4 minutes.” Betsy Weber of TechSmith says, “For the blog, my goal is usually around a 3-5 minute video.”

Brooks Andrus says we should consider Twitter a model for brevity when creating videos. He explains:

… most [users] don’t have the tools or narrative capabilities to hold the attention of an audience for any real span of time. This is especially true in the screencasting realm which is why I’d like to propose the notion of TweetCasts–120 seconds or less of webcam or screen video. That’s all the time you get to make your point. If you need more time, break your content into chunks, give viewers a rest between segments and try engaging them through a different medium.

I agree with Brooks. As informal video producers, we don’t have the time to implement mesmerizing Hollywood cinematic techniques to keep our audience’s attention. It’s better to break long segments up into little chunks. It might be good to actually keep videos at 120 seconds, as Brooks recommends. Although sometimes you need up to three or four minutes to actually explain a feature, there’s no reason you can’t have several videos about the same feature.

Look at how Lynda.com approaches their videos. The following is a breakdown of videos about PowerPoint.

Lynda.com sample outline

This approach allows the user to skip to the part he or she wants to know. For example, in the above list of videos, I viewed only the videos with the eye icon next to them. Because the videos were chunked into small units, I could skip the video content I didn’t want to sit through. Small chunks give the user control and avoid the problem of never-ending rambling that I explained earlier.

Advantages to Short Videos

Aside from maintaining the user’s attention, keeping your videos short has several other advantages:

No worries about load time. A three-minute video rarely results in a file size of more than 10 MB. In contrast, with a 10 minute video, it could easily be 30 MB, which creates more problems when you deliver it. With large file sizes, you have to consider how to optimize the video. Do you reduce the visual and audio clarity? Do you force users to wait for it to load? Do you resort to streaming options? You don’t have to worry about file sizes and load time when your video is short.

You make fewer mistakes creating it. When you record a video, if you only have two minutes, you’re less likely to make mistakes than with longer videos. If the script is short, you can more quickly rehearse and practice the steps so you know what you’re going to say, what you’re going to click, and you can make sure all the glitches are out before recording. In contrast, with a 10 minute video, you set yourself up for numerous mistakes in both narration and demonstration.

Post-production is easier too. If you have a short video, it’s a lot easier to edit in post-production than a long video. With a long video, you may end up with multiple video segments on your timeline, with several audio tracks, each at specific points on the timeline. Editing an eight or ten minute video can be a nightmare in video choreography. Sliding over audio in one section can produce gaps in another section, and so on. It’s just a lot easier if the video is short.

No need for a TOC pane. If you have a long video, you usually need to add a table of contents so the user can see what you’re covering and when. But adding a TOC pane takes up precious screen real estate that usually you don’t have. If you record your videos at 1024 x 768, adding a 175px TOC pane on the left increases your video’s size to about 1200px, in addition to whatever space the browser frame takes up. You usually can’t assume your viewers will have that much screen real estate. If you shrink your videos, you often end up with fuzzy displays. In contrast, short videos don’t need a TOC because the purpose of the video is focused.

Active learning increases. If your video is short, you increase the sense of active learning that takes place. By active learning I mean you give users control to make decisions, to click to the video they want to see.  This keeps the users more engaged. In contrast, if you force users to sit for extended periods of time in a passive state of mind, without allowing them to choose their own adventure, their minds turn numb. To keep their attention in a long video, you have to resort to all kinds of interactive strategies or cinematic techniques so they don’t fall asleep. Quizzes, branching, let-me-try situations, bending window panes that fly in and out, dynamic illustrations and diagrams — these are all good, but if you don’t have time to implement them, keeping your videos short decreases the need for these tactics.

It can be hard to keep the video short, because sometimes we feel we have to tackle an entire component in one go. But it’s not hard to break a video up into multiple subvideos about the same topic. And what viewer wouldn’t rather click on several two-minute videos than sit through a ten-minute video with an eternally rambling narrator?

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A few years ago, I was talking with a guy named Clyde about blogging. He wasn’t sure what topic he wanted to write about, and I encouraged him to pick a topic he was passionate about and stick with that focus. Clyde was interested in two things: music and tech comm. So he actually started two blogs, one for each topic. He also planned to start a podcast and so ordered a podcasting kit.

After a while, his music blog faded (before he even wrote 10 posts, I think). And his interest about tech comm also faded, leaving him looking for a new direction. Gradually he moved toward the psychology of well-being, which I believe is learning to feel good about life, yourself, and those around you. He stayed with that focus for quite a while before blog-fading entirely.

Clyde’s story is typical. We often think about our interests and passions, and they have little to do with technical writing (or whatever our day job is). So we start writing about those side interests (for example, one of my side interests is basketball). But we soon realize a couple of problems: first, to write well about a topic, you have to be immersed in knowledge about the topic, both reading about it and having personal experiences (coupled together, these two make a strong combination). If we don’t have any new knowledge we’re constantly acquiring or daily experiences we’re having about the topic, we lose substance in our writing. So in the end, regardless of the topic we choose, we gravitate toward writing about what we know or what we’re experiencing.

When new bloggers ask me for advice about what to blog about, I tell them not to worry about their focus for the first month. Just crank out a couple of dozen posts. Then, after you’ve done some writing, analyze your trends. What topics are you naturally moving towards? What topics do you keep coming back to again and again? Okay, now brand your site with that focus.

Sometimes people who lock themselves into a focus feel trapped. One person told me that if he narrowed his blog’s focus to tech comm., he would only have 28 posts to write (he could think of no more). It’s okay to move outside your natural path at times. Like a hiker, you can take side trails to go look at a scenic vista or lake, but you always return to the main trail, the trail that takes you toward your destination.

Your blog's focus is like a trail you follow -- a few offshoots are allowed

One of the paradoxes of having a focus is that, rather than limiting the topics you can write about, it actually opens you up to more ideas. Your focus gives rise to more creativity because you start looking at life through the lens of your blog’s focus. For example, let’s say you’re playing basketball and you want to blog about defense somehow but it’s not your blog’s focus so you don’t want to write about it. When you look at defense from the perspective of tech comm., ideas start to flow. For example, defense is partly about knowing where to look. You don’t look at the person you’re guarding or the person with the ball — you look in the middle of the two, so that you can follow them both with your peripheral vision. Having this vision of the larger picture, being able to see the other players and the direction of their movements, helps you see motivations, agendas, and how different groups interact. You can’t make good decisions until you can see the larger picture and leverage different motives.

That’s not really much of a post, but it’s moving in the direction of a post. You can see how having a focus gives you a lens through which to look at the world around you, and that lens helps you see the world in a new light?

After you decide on a focus, brand your site with it. Your URL and blog title (it’s best to have them match) should communicate your focus, as well as the tagline. Your About page should also describe your blog’s focus in greater depth.

No matter how granular of a focus you choose (for example, a blog about Hello Kitty), because of the global landscape, you will find others in the same niche. This is the concept of the Long Tail. The Long Tail asserts that niche products sold online to a global audience have more potential for revenue than the small core group of mainstream products. Your blog can be powerful within a niche. In fact, your focus on a niche rather than a mainstream topic is what gives social media its power. But regardless of the topic, stick with that general focus.

Oct 9 Update

I have to add an update to this post after reading Penelope Trunk’s post, Blogs without topics are a waste of time. Our points are about the same, but the approaches are different. One idea in her post that made sense to me was the idea of a contract with the reader. She writes,

In the history of writing, everything has a focus. It’s a contract you have with the reader. You stay within the bounds of the reader’s expectations, and if you do that, you can write surprises that seem to stray from your topic, and the reader stays with you. Because surprises are fun. But if there’s no contract because there is no focus, then there are no surprises. Every great piece of writing works this way.

Think about it: Canterbury Tales. The topic is getting to the end of the trip. Or Moby Dick. Melville can write about everything—God, the American dream, fishing boats, marriage, mental illness—and he gets away with it because his topic is totally solid: Nailing the whale.

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When I finish a task, I move the task's representative paper square to the pile on the right

The paper squares help me focus on the task at hand. My world is one of increasing distraction. Not ten minutes goes by that I’m not distracted by incoming email messages, phone calls, instant messages, team blog posts, RSS feeds, Twitter posts and replies, ping pong, and more. Having a little piece of paper in front of me (e.g., #6) helps me remember what my task is and keeps me motivated to work through all ten.

In numbering the tasks, avoid writing anything that can’t be accomplished in an hour. For example, if you’re working on a brochure, which could easily take you all day, break down the tasks into one hour increments. For example, #1 Insert Images, #2 Write First Paragraph Copy, #3 Format Print Layout, #4 Finish Copy for Second Column, and so on. By keeping the tasks finishable, it keeps you motivated.

When you push through five of your tasks before noon, you feel on top of the world. Conversely, if it’s 3 p.m. and you’re only on task #4, you can feel that your day hasn’t been productive. (This is why you need to keep the tasks relatively small.)

The core idea behind the two piles of paper here, besides breaking down large tasks into small ones (which, when completed, makes you feel good), is to provide a visual object to focus your attention, so that even after a brief distraction, you look down, see #6, and know exactly what you should be working on.

Every time you complete a task and move a piece of paper to the pile on the right, it feels like you’re truly getting things done. Conversely, if you consistently can’t work through even half of the ten tasks, it makes you feel slow, behind, and inefficient. It’s kind of a polarizing pat-on-the-back or slap-in-the-face effect.

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This podcast is a recording of the Blogging, Podcasting, and Screencasting presentation that I gave to the TransAlpine conference in Vienna in June 2009. In the presentation, I explore what well-known bloggers, podcasters, and screencasters do to inspire readers to become devoted followers rather than just casual subscribers.

Devoted followers stay updated with each new post, podcast, or screencast, eagerly awaiting the next new one. They’re intimately familiar with your content and either comment regularly or regularly return to your site. In contrast, casual subscribers may check out the site from time to time (if they even remember the title), but they feel no loyalty to the blogger/podcaster/screencaster. Months could pass without an update and they wouldn’t notice.

Rather than explore blogs, podcasts, and screencasts as separate media with their own unique characteristics, I group them together and explore eight common characteristics that make blogs/podcasts/screencasts successful: relevance, story, appropriate revealing, voice, readability, visibility, interaction, and regularity.

If you want to follow the PowerPoint, view it here. It’s not sync’ed with the audio, so you just have to guess where I am (but the PowerPoint is mostly visual anyway, since that’s my PowerPoint style). Also, because of the length (90 minutes overall), I divided the podcast into two parts. This is part 1.

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For the past couple of weeks, I’ve been thinking about what being a personal branding winner means. Just six months ago, I hated using the word “brand” with blogging. It felt too much like marketing and sales. I don’t necessarily write to a brand, I thought. I just write.

Then the other night I had dinner with Alan Houser of Group Wellesley. Alan (@arh) is one of the Summit chairs responsible for selecting and shaping the content of the STC Summit. As we were talking, I learned that Alan provides training and consulting on the Adobe Technical Communication Suite. This surprised me, because in the past I had seen Alan present only on DITA and XML, so I assumed DITA and XML was his niche, not the Tech Comm Suite. He said was aware of the DITA/ XML branding and wasn’t sure he wanted that as his brand.

I know that I’ve branded myself as someone knowledgeable about blogging, podcasting, and WordPress. Being branded is always a mixed feeling. On the one hand, you do want to be recognized as someone worth listening to on specific topics. On the other hand, it always feels stifling to be categorized and labeled. Alan did acknowledge that I write about a broad range of topics on my blog.

Branding is an inevitable consequence when you pursue a specific niche. But here’s the cool thing about branding and blogging: you can construct your own identity, more or less, by simply writing consistently about those topics.

For example, do you want to be an expert on XML publishing? Start an XML publishing blog. Do you want to be an expert on career management? Start a career management blog. Do you want to be an expert on cincillas? Start a blog on cincillas. You get the point.

The path to branded expertise is not so different from traditional branding paths — it’s just easier. Traditionally, to brand yourself as an expert on any topic, you publish articles in journals, you write books, you give presentations, etc.

The difference is that with blogs, you can just start writing, publishing, and presenting without the hassle of editorial rejection and filtering. Your content still appears in a print form online (or in audio or video), and to the general reader, seeing you expound on a topic in a semi-interesting way is enough to persuade him or her that you know what you’re talking about.

In sum, just as blogs simplify publishing, they also simplify and streamline identity management. The real question is deciding who you want to be.

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1. Make your help a mile wide and thirty seconds deep.

Users spend about 30 seconds on a help topic, so keep it short and get right to the point. On the other hand, try to cover as many of the problems users encounter as possible.

2. Don’t document everything. Instead, focus on the context of the user’s problems.

Avoid the trap of trying to provide “complete” instructions that don’t address problems users will likely have. Long introductions, tables of buttons, menu explanations, and other information not directly focused on the context of users’ problems will lead to unnecessary information glut.

3. Put help where users perform tasks.

Users need help in the application, so that’s where the help should appear, not in a separate training system. When you separate learning from work, users are less likely to stop work and turn to another system to learn. The tasks they do and the help for those tasks should be integrated in the same user interface.

4. The research about the usability of help is that people don’t use help.

Research about how people use help often specifically prompts them into a help file, but the natural tendency, without these prompts, is for users to ignore the help altogether.

5. Avoid obvious instructions.

If you can figure something out on your own, so too can the users. Let your help focus on the true problems that users will encounter. Look for points of paint and information gaps on each page. Ask yourself, where am I getting stuck? Where will users get stuck?

6. Search results are a great opportunity to include help.

An empty search results set is a perfect place to include links to help, such as FAQs or top problems, because users are specifically looking for help content. Many times help authors neglect this space.

7. Quick reference guides are read more than marketing material.

Users are more apt to read quick reference guides than marketing material. If you need to get a product message across, it might find more readership embedded in the quick reference guide.

8. Phrase help links as short questions in the interface.

Help links and buttons are practically invisible to the user. But if you phrase your help as short questions in the interface, users are more likely to click them. When you do this, be selective about how frequently you implement the question links.

9. Tools and technologies can distract you from what matters most: the content.

Sometimes spending too much time implementing bells and whistles that tools provide (for example, javascript drop-downs and custom skins) can remove your focus on  the content. DITA allows you to refocus on the content, since you no longer can control formatting (once you set it all up).

10. Almost everyone has a microphone for their computer.

This is the fourth podcast I’ve recorded that’s a “double-ender technique,” where both the interviewee and I record individually on each of our machines in Audacity and then I overlay and sync the two tracks. I’ve found that almost everyone seems to have a microphone and doesn’t have trouble recording in Audacity. Previously, I’d assumed this technique required too much from the interviewee.

Additional Resources

• “Straight Talk: Surviving Tough Times as a User Assistance Writer”
• UX Matters
• Mike Hughes’ blog

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