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 »

In my last post, I argued that rhetoric is the foundation of communication. Rhetoric is the practice of fitting the message to the context to get the results you want. In the most common scenario for technical writers and instructional designers, the rhetorical context is a learning situation. You want the user to learn new software or hardware. What’s the best way to organize content … 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 »

On Linkedin, I’ve been reading an excellent thread of answers to the question, “Do you read user manuals?” Of the 50 people who answered, the resounding response is No, I don’t read the manual. I try to figure out the application on my own. I only turn to the manual when I get stuck and can’t figure out a feature. Or I turn to the … more »

In a recent IT Author podcast (“Documentation and Agile Development“), Alistair Christie and Graham Campbell talk about agile development and its impact on documentation. One consequence of working in an agile environment, they say, is the need to prioritize your documentation, to deliver instructions for only the most important or confusing features. Presumably, some agile environments move so fast, you have to triage what you … more »

The Blockhead Blog: Beware the Default Manual.

Have you ever asked your users what kind of training materials they want, or how they prefer to learn software? This kind of information is critical to figuring out what help deliverables to produce. But really when it comes down to it, there are only so many options — printed manuals, short guides, interactive flash guides, videos, online help, live training, reference cards, context-sensitive help, … more »