Oh, that field? he said. I never really understood that feature, so I left it alone.

The user wasn’t a novice. He used this application several hours a day, if not more. How could he be so comfortable leaving alone a feature that could be integral to his workflow, which could save him hours of time and make his life easier? I could hardly believe it.

Knowledge Intake Thresholds

As I related the feedback to my colleagues, they noted how we often do the same thing with applications we use. For example, I use iTunes to download podcasts, create playlists, and sync the audio to my iPod. I know iTunes can do a whole lot more, such as create smart playlists based on the music I most often play, but I’m not interested in that. I don’t quite know how to set it up, and frankly I’m happy with my current level of understanding.

Photoshop is another example. I can get by in Photoshop all right. Only when I absolutely have to learn something, such as layer masks, do I start pushing my knowledge deeper by going into the help.

I often give one-on-one WordPress training. This past Saturday I scheduled a two-hour call with someone implementing a wootheme. At about an hour and a half into the call, I could tell the person’s brain was saturated. I had hit the threshold on her knowledge intake for the day.

My own knowledge intake threshold maxes out at about an hour. This is why classes at schools aren’t longer than 50 minutes. After an hour, the amount of new knowledge you can continue to absorb goes downhill.

Long-Term Learning

As technical writers, it’s hard to feel empathy for users when they refuse to learn. It’s all in the manual, if they would just read it, we often say. But we have to remember that we spend months ramping up on a software application — users don’t. Our first experience of the application is usually in a development environment where features are only half-coded. As time passes and new features are developed, and we attend project meeting after meeting, we slowly add the new knowledge to what we’ve already learned. After six months of gradual ramping up, we’re experts on the application. We then try to teach users to be experts in a day, or more realistically, in about 20 minutes.

Do you see the problem? We get six months to learn little by little, being paid handsomely to do so. The user gets 20 minutes and must often take time out of his or her schedule to do it. It’s no wonder the user doesn’t naturally move into the expert knowledge range.

A more practical way to learn new software is to approach it bit by bit. An hour a day over the course of a month can be more helpful than a crash course. But how do you keep the user learning every day or week?

Strategies to Keep the User Learning

I’ve seen at least four methods to help users keep learning an application:

• Daily tips. Some applications show a daily tip in an attempt to increase your knowledge little by little. However, these tips are often as successful as ad pop-ups on websites.
• Regular newsletters. Some companies provide a regular newsletter about their products. For example, TechSmith provides a periodic newsletter that usually has a couple of tips for using Camtasia Studio and Snagit. I scan this newsletter and will watch a video tutorial on a feature I’m unfamiliar with.
• Product blogs. Some products are robust enough that the company has an entire blog focused on the application. Microsoft Office is one example.
• Interface tips. When there’s a new feature added to the application, the interface often highlights what’s new through a little bubble caption. This is common in Gmail.

Encouraging Desire

Besides these methods, I’m not sure what you can do to help users continue to increase their knowledge of an application. The problem is that even if you provide the means for advanced learning, whether through tips, newsletters, blogs, or interface notes; users already familiar in performing a core set of tasks are inclined to remain in their comfort zone.

In their minds, they already know the application. Or they know it well enough to get by. As with most things in life, the problem in helping users learn isn’t so much strategy as awareness and desire. They often don’t know what they’re missing. So they don’t care about missing it.

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Last night, unable to sleep at about 4 a.m., either because I went to bed early or because I simply couldn’t sleep, I grabbed my BlackBerry, on its usual place on my nightstand, and began to read through my email and feeds, as I am accustomed to do, lying half-conscious on my pillow, when I saw this intriguing question from Harold Motley about whether the transition from literary studies to technical communication was fairly common, or rather difficult.

Harold writes,

I’ve just recently came across your website and I find your posts and podcasts very informative and interesting. I’m currently a third year undergraduate student studying English, philosophy and professional writing. In exploring possible post-undergraduate paths and careers, I have been extensively researching the careers of law and technical communication.

My strongest skill is writing; and most of the writing I do is through the form of papers, essays etc. in which I analyze text and form arguments. In addition to applying to law school I am also looking for other careers in which I can apply my strength and interest in writing.

I have looked at M.A. programs in Technical Communication and found a few in Chicago (where I live) and I was just wondering how beneficial this degree would be if I were to pursue a career in technical communication.

I do not have much technical knowledge aside from the standard programs like those in Microsoft Office. Would this hinder a successful transition into technical communication, or is the technical knowledge something I would acquire through grad school?

I’m planning on taking a technical writing class and another on writing & the Web, which I think would act as a good intro into technical communication. Is the transition from literary studies to technical communication fairly common, or is it rather difficult? Also, what’s your opinion on a M.A. in Technical Communication and Information Design vs. a M.A. in Information Architecture?

I greatly appreciate any feedback you can give.

Harold

To summarize, you’re debating between a career as a technical communicator or a lawyer, and you feel an inclination to pursue a masters program in technical communication because your strength is writing. If you pursue this route, you want to know whether you should get an advanced degree in some technical communication/information design/information architecture field.

First, let me say that I have no idea how to advise you. And according to Joel Spolsky and Dave Winer, the blogosphere has too many examples of people expounding on things — often from anecdotal evidence — without having any expertise in the subject.

In that spirit, I direct you to the excellent post Scott Nesbitt wrote yesterday, which is amazingly and coincidentally relevant to your question. Responding to the question of whether would-be technical writers should take courses, Scott writes,

If you want to [take courses in technical writing], fine. I’ve never taken a formal technical writing course and I’ve done OK. That’s not quite true; in the late 90s, I did start to do a certificate program in information design and finished about half of the required courses.

Essentially, I’m a street-trained technical writer and technologist. I learned the basics of tech writing from a textbook that I bought at my alma mater’s bookstore in the early 1990s. I put what I learned from that volume into practice by writing manuals for myself and for a community environmental group with which I volunteered. I critiqued those manuals, and others that I read. I wrote articles for technology publications. I taught myself HTML, graphics conversion, various computer skills, UNIX, and even tried to get a handle on SGML.

But a big part of my development as a technical communicator was the two years that I spent working at a financial software firm. Long hours, a mix of applications running on Windows and OpenVMS, and a lot of developers with a low tolerance for ignorance honed various skills.

That’s not to say a technical writing course won’t be useful. I just never saw the need for one. (“Becoming a Technical Communicator”)

Rather than putting all your effort into a technical writing course, Scott recommends you acquire technical knowledge related to whatever it is you’re documenting:

Aside from basic computer skills, you should have (or plan to acquire) a good level of technical knowledge. At the very least, you should have a cursory knowledge of the key technologies you will or may be working with, of programming and scripting languages, and more.

I echo what Scott says — if you need to know Java, or HTML, or some other technology, learn it. It may be more valuable to you than an academic degree.

Scott also brings up the importance of acquiring technical knowledge to gain respect from other team members. (Note: If respect is important to you, be sure to read this guest post: Technical Writing Careers – The Raw, Unvarnished Truth.)

About applying to law school — when I was in college, I had a similar dilemma as you. I didn’t know whether I should pursue law or writing. My father supported me in either direction, but he thought fondly of the idea of my “sallying forth to battle the evils of the world through law,” or something to that effect.

I decided, for reasons I can’t remember, to go in the direction of writing instead. A few years later, while I was getting an MFA in creative writing, I became friends with a Columbia law student. Often at his house there would be dozens of law books lying around — half read, with bookmarks in various places. I realized, looking at his reading, that I never had an interest in law and could care less about this or that legal decision. I looked back to my deliberation between law and writing as foolishness.

So my advice to you on careers is this: What kinds of books do you have lying around your house? What are your real interests? Are you looking into law because you find law interesting, or because it’s one of those classic careers that everyone considers?

Now granted, it’s unlikely that you have a bunch of technical writing manuals lying around your house. (If so, you are weird.) Most likely you have literary texts here and there. You should know that technical writing is not the same as literary analysis, but it is still writing. As a technical writer, the kind of content people pay you to write is not creatively fulfilling. But that doesn’t mean it’s not challenging — it can bend your mind in exhausting ways.

A 250 page manual for a complicated product may be more difficult to write than a master’s thesis. It may require a massive amount of deductive and inductive logic, as you try to figure out how the product works. You may spend months interviewing subject matter experts, asking them hundreds of questions about how the product functions, and then hundreds more to clarify their cryptic answers.

Once you accumulate a massive jumble of information, you’ll rack your brain trying to organize and arrange the content in a way that fits the vocabulary and behavior of your audience. You’ll shape and craft the manual, analyzing how each topic fits into the whole. You’ll shave words and phrases to increase the conciseness, rearrange one paragraph with another, deliberate over word choice and semantics, and consult various style manuals to ensure proper word choice, formatting, and punctuation.

As you near the end, you’ll go through the tedious editorial process, reviewing the printed manual with a red pen, circling, crossing out, writing notes, and then inputting your edits. Once you finish, you’ll feel a tremendous sense of accomplishment and breathe a heavy sigh of relief. Does this sound like a familiar process to you? It should.

Much like a scholarly essay on literature, almost no one will read it, except a select handful of people whom you will never meet. But you’ll still feel a lasting reward knowing that you conquered a monster and helped people come closer to the application truth, similar to how a literary scholar unfolds a book to show how the text really functions.

In brief, yes, your preparation in literary studies will prepare you well for the analytical and exhausting challenges of technical writing.

As to the question of which masters program I recommend, again, follow your interests. However, I see a lot more jobs for technical writers than I do for information architects or information designers. Given the state of the economy, you might not want to confine your specialty to a small niche that sounds cool, but in the end isn’t marketable.

Here are some other posts on the subject:

• Technical Writing Careers — Answering 13 Questions About Technical Writing Jobs
• The Question No One Asked Me at the Career Advice Panel, Thank Goodness
• Personal Essays on a Technical Writing Career — By John Hewitt
• 14 Widespread Myths about Technical Writing
• Is technical writing boring?
• Going Beyond Technical Writing: Practical Advice for Diversifying Your Skillset
• Technical Writing: Worth it? Interesting? Creative? Well-paid? Answering a few questions from Saudi Arabia
• Ten Technical Writing Stereotypes
• How to Break into Technical Writing
• Is Technical Writing a Calling or a Job — Recommended DMN Communications Podcast

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