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 Continue Reading »
Tag Archives: manuals
Organizing Content for Constructivist Learning [Organizing Content #28]
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 Continue Reading »
Chrysler Drops Long Car Manuals in Favor of Short Guides + Video
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 Continue Reading »
Users Read Help Manuals Like an Encyclopedia, Not a Novel
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 Continue Reading »
How Much Should You Document? Everything? Strategies for an Agile Environment
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 Continue Reading »
The Blockhead Blog: Beware the Default Manual
The Kind of Documentation Users Really Want
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 Continue Reading »