Mark Baker’s post, Why documentation analytics may misread, presents an appealing argument about why it doesn’t matter if just a few people read the manual. In his post, Mark argues that a small number of key influencers who read the manual can share the knowledge with a much larger group who do not read the manual. The effect of the manual, therefore, disseminates out to … more »

Catalyst 6: QA Testing As if I hadn’t already been wearing enough hats, participating in both design, support, training, and help, I soon started to wear another hat: quality assurance (QA). We use JIRA as our bug tracking tool. It’s mostly used by QA and developers to log bugs, enhancements, and user stories. I always knew it would be good practice to keep abreast of … more »

Catalyst 2: User Experience We didn’t have a very good support model for the application. It became clear that our service desk, which included mostly BYU students working part-time and supporting over 100 different applications, couldn’t answer questions that users had. They would only escalate the questions to us. And not many of our customers trusted the support desk anyway. Eventually the project manager started … more »

A lot of departments think that a team needs a style guide and a unified approach, if you want the audience to experience a consistent, professional branded experience. I used to think the same. In fact, just last week, we started discussing whether to use greater than symbols (>) or pipes (|) or nothing at all to indicate menu hierarchy and subtabs. I admit that … more »

I’m giving an STC webinar on blogging this Wednesday, July 29, from 1:00 to 2:30 p.m. ET. Here’s the title and description: Converting Readers from Casual Subscribers to Devoted Followers: Best Practices for Blogging Although many people feel blogging is an activity with no best practices or rules—you publish what you want, when you want, and how you want—these same bloggers usually crave readership, comments, … more »