Joe Welinske’s latest book, Developing User Assistance for Mobile Apps (published June 2011), fills a gap in tech comm literature that is sorely needed. Joe explores strategies and techniques for providing user assistance for mobile devices, and goes in depth with iOS, Android, Windows, and tablets. Early in the book, he explains: Hopefully the organizations that employ us will start buying smartphone devices for us … more »

Robert Desprez has an interesting post on How Will Technical Writing Change in the Next Ten Years. Among a few predictions, he writes the following about tech comm’s future for mobile: We’ll all be preparing our online help for mobile devices. Smartphones and tablets are expected to start outselling computers in the near future. More and more people will be using these devices to work … more »

Yesterday I had a meeting with some managers about a series of quick reference guides that I had been preparing. If you remember, much of my callout post referred to a strategy about callout design. It was the same project. (The team actually went with bubble callouts rather than my minimalist callouts, but that’s another story.) During the meeting, as the team looked at the … more »

In looking back over 2010, mobile trends dominated the marketplace. MobileFuture.org created the following video to illustrate: Here are a few of the surprising mobile stats: FIVE BILLION apps downloaded — up from 300 million in 2009 347 PERCENT growth in Twitter mobile usage 100 MILLION YouTube videos played on mobile devices everyday 3,000 PERCENT growth in one carrier’s data traffic since 2008 3,339: average … more »

In this video, I talk with Joe Welinski from WritersUA about strategies for entering the mobile market, particularly in landing contracts for iPhone and iPad application help and user interface design. Joe runs the WritersUA conference each year.

In this videocast, I talk with Neil Perlin at hyperword.com about the trend toward mobile outputs for help and other information deliverables. Neil had just given a demonstration of a mobile output from Flare, and he mentioned to me that mobile was a direction he wants to specialize in. We recorded this video in the Expo hall at the STC Summit in Dallas.

At the Intermountain STC workshop this morning, we talked about how to build an online presence. During my portion of the workshop, I facilitated a discussion using Twitter. With the dozen participants, all sitting in front of computers with Internet access, I told them to go to Search.Twitter.com and search for the #imstc hashtag. I posed a question for them to answer via Twitter. They … more »