I was surprised and mildly pleased this weekend to see my sister-in-law Karin give a quick reference guide or “cheat sheet,” as she called it, to her grandma for her birthday. The guide focused on accessing and sending email in Gmail. Grandma was grateful and elated to see the work and detail that went into the guide, which was laminated and narrow enough to prop … more »

One of my readers, Shweta, asks the following question: I am a Technical Communicator working in a software services company in India. I have been reading your posts daily from a long time now. I am developing end-user documentation for an access control product. The current application that I have is huge and so is the user manual (550 pages, which I am sure not … more »

A while ago I was gathering feedback on different tech comm deliverables. I asked a user if she preferred videos or written material when learning software. I thought she would immediately say “videos,” but it was a toss up for her. In her mind, videos involved long stretches of narration that included sitting passively at her computer, waiting for the narrator to get to her … 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 »

Chrysler moved their car manuals from the traditional thick paper manual to a shorter format  accompanied by a DVD. Chrysler says the switch will not only save 20,000 trees a year, the videos on the DVD will also be more helpful to users trying to perform tasks. The shorter quick reference guides will still be 60-80 pages long (judging from the photo below, they also … more »

Have you ever told a project manager that the instructions he plans on releasing with an application — instructions written by an intern who is here for a three-month stint — are complete junk and that it would be an embarrassment to the organization to give them to users? When you tell a project manager that, surprise, you win yourself a new documentation project. That’s … more »