I'd Rather Be Writing » mobile

Book Review: Developing User Assistance for Mobile Apps, by Joe Welinske

Tom Johnson — Tue, 02 Aug 2011 17:18:36 +0000

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 to work with just as they provide us with desktop workstations (13).

It would be odd to be an IT employee in a company without being provisioned a computer. Now that mobile is becoming more common, shouldn’t we also be provisioned a mobile device too, if not several?

One of my colleagues just recently purchased his first smartphone. He decided to buy it himself rather than asking our organization to pay for it. Usually only employees with special needs to be reached outside of work times receive smartphones.

But the world has changed. We know that mobile is quickly becoming the most common way for people across the world to access the Internet. It’s much more common to consider and plan mobile development at the same time that you’re building a browser-based application. Mobile is no longer an afterthought. It should be part of our regular workflow, strategy, and deliverables — not just for developers, but for technical writers too.

Given the need to add user assistance deliverables to mobile, where do you start? Almost every mobile device has an emulator or simulator that allows you to explore the functionality from another computer. You also need the right software and setup. For most of us, this is a new world with unfamiliar terrain. How do you connect, how do you test, what software do you need, how do you publish, and how does it all vary by device? Joe covers all of this in depth for the major mobile platforms.

Additionally, he explores techniques for integrating help into mobile apps. Brevity and user testing are guiding principles. But as for a standard, “the look and feel of the UA is as varied as the apps themselves” (19). You can use everything from Dashcode (a mobile help authoring tool), to text built-in to the app, a standalone webpage, or many other solutions.

As for mobile help formats, I was also pleased to read the following advice for mobile documentation:

Many support situations can benefit from a richer level of presentation to the user. Videos and demos can provide a more engaging experience. The audio/visual capabilities of video make it a great choice for showing complex tasks and helping the viewer feel at ease. Demonstrations are useful for presenting an automated tutorial about tasks and procedures (28).

Yes, even on a mobile device, videos and other rich presentations have a place. When you consider the advanced interactions with mobile devices — the gestures, the pinches and squeezes, the flicks and two-finger scroll, the back swipe, etc., you need to see some of these gestures in action to understand.

Undoubtedly, the diversity of mobile devices makes documentation tricky. Joe says the “wildly different UIs that we find in our apps mean that users can’t necessarily carry conventions from one app to another. Unique icons, buttons, and menu structures can create angst for users” (41).

The operating systems and hardware buttons vary from the iPhone, Android, Windows, and tablets. Android itself has many different devices, with different buttons across the bottom. Not only do the operating systems vary, so do the built-in browsers. You need to test your output in all of these devices.

Add to this mix some difficulty in describing finger/touch movements (are these in your style guide?) and how those gesture words might translate, and you have a real challenge. What may have seemed simple suddenly becomes a full-blown documentation challenge.

Joe’s book is an excellent guide to get started in the world of mobile user assistance. The book is brief (142 pages) but thorough enough to get you comfortable in this space.

To learn more or buy the book, see Developing User Assistance for Mobile Apps.

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Predicting Tech Comm’s Future for Mobile

Tom Johnson — Fri, 29 Apr 2011 14:42:03 +0000

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 and will need technical assistance. I expect this is the next “big thing” for us.

I agree that mobile devices will continue to grow. Every statistic suggests that computers will become more advanced, tiny, and ubiquitous. However, given that we have more than 350,000 iPhone apps right now, and the market for technical documentation for mobile apps hasn’t flourished, why should we think mobile will factor heavily into tech comm’s future?

I do think mobile will play a larger role, but several things will need to change before mobile becomes a prominent playing field for technical writers.

The Missing App

The one app that iPhone lacks is a screen recorder app (like Camtasia Studio) to capture video demos of all these apps. I don’t mean screen capture; I mean live video that records the screen’s actions like a movie. It’s the one app the iPhone needs the most.

The only way to create a screencast of an iPhone app is to run an iPhone emulator on a Mac. Currently the developers have to load up a development environment on your Mac, or you have to borrow one of their machines after hours and record a screencast (which I actually did a couple of months ago).

When mobile devices allow you to more easily record the screen, there might be a greater need for mobile screencasts, and technical communicators (with screencasting skills) might begin to play a larger role.

QR Codes

Another big shift might be the prevalence of QR codes. Imagine hiking on a trail or exploring a city with your mobile device. You stumble across a building, a monument, or some other interesting object. It has a QR code (or something similar) on it. You hold up your mobile device and voila, immediately you’re learning about that object. These codes would enable an era of location-based documentation.

QR codes could also be handy when you’re working on your car’s engine. All of those mysterious parts — if only each part had a QR code. Or let’s say you’re taking apart your refridgerator to fix something. What does each component do or mean? If you had QR code stickers attached to each part, you could let people know more information about it.

Download a QR code app on your mobile device and take a picture of this image with the app to see the hidden message.

Field Reference Guides

The third major use of mobile for tech comm lies in the field reference guide. While you probably wouldn’t look up help information for a desktop app as you’re sitting at you’re computer, imagine if you’re wandering in the woods looking for a certain type of bird. It would be nice to have the field guide as an app that you could navigate offline as you’re wandering.

I sit at a desk all day, so it’s hard for me to contemplate what it’s like to have a job where you walk around, or where you’re frequently outside. But let’s say you’re a door-to-door salesman. It might be nice to have a product list app on your mobile device that describes every product your company sells, along with a brief description and picture.

Or maybe you’re a technician for a large company, with a lot of different devices, networks, and other technical infrastructure that you have to take care of. It would be nice to have a mobile reference guide for all the components you’re responsible for.

The perfect scenario for mobile documentation is actually in the kitchen. For cooking novices like me, sometimes recipe books use jargon like “chop the carrots in julianne style” or “blanch the broccoli” or “braise the turkey” or “cook the caramel until it reaches a soft ball stage.” It would be nice to have those recipes on a mobile device with links to more information or videos showing more detail of what it all means. I know I’d be the first one to buy such an app.

The possibilities for incorporating tech comm guides and videos on mobile devices are just opening up. The problem is that so many tech comm jobs are in software, and the sweet spot for tech comm with mobile isn’t with software. There are 350,000 apps, most without documentation, to prove that. The real opportunities for mobile lie with location-based information needs, or information needs for people who aren’t at their computers.

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Less Text, Please: Contemporary Reading Behaviors and Short Formats

Tom Johnson — Fri, 21 Jan 2011 08:29:12 +0000

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 callouts on the quick reference guides, they felt there was too much text. Reduce the text, increase the font, they said.

Reduce the text? Make it even shorter? The content was already a two-page quick reference guide. Were we now to make it a postcard?

I get this feedback a lot. Hand any help material to a non-writer in a meeting, and the request I routinely hear is to make it shorter. Too much text. People aren’t going to read this, they say, as if they were expecting to take in the entire content with a five-second glance.

My experiences lead me to wonder about the possible transformation of reading experiences, and if reading is still the same in our online age. When you add in the immediacy of online content, hyperlinks, mobile formats, RSS feeds, and endless information, do people still read in the same way? And if people read differently today than they did 50 years ago, how do we change our help deliverables to fit contemporary reading patterns?

Attention Spans

Probably the most radical argument about shifted reading behaviors comes from Nicholas Carr, who asserts that Google has rewired his brain, reduced his attention span, and given him more superficial reading habits, including some fidgeting. In short, Carr thinks that Internet content has made him “stupid.” In an article in The Atlantic, Carr explains,

Over the past few years I’ve had an uncomfortable sense that someone, or something, has been tinkering with my brain, remapping the neural circuitry, reprogramming the memory. My mind isn’t going—so far as I can tell—but it’s changing. I’m not thinking the way I used to think. I can feel it most strongly when I’m reading. Immersing myself in a book or a lengthy article used to be easy. My mind would get caught up in the narrative or the turns of the argument, and I’d spend hours strolling through long stretches of prose. That’s rarely the case anymore. Now my concentration often starts to drift after two or three pages. I get fidgety, lose the thread, and begin looking for something else to do. I feel as if I’m always dragging my wayward brain back to the text. The deep reading that used to come naturally has become a struggle. (Is Google Making Us Stupid?)

In other words, rather than sitting down with a book and immersing himself in it, drowning out the world around him as he drinks in page after page, he now gets restless after a few pages. His attention span compels him to turn somewhere else, to read from a different author or source. His reading experience is much more cursory and shallow, thanks to the Internet.

Steven Johnson also argues a similar point in the Wall Street Journal. He has the epiphany while sitting alone in a restaurant in Texas. He argues that the deep, immersive reading experience evaporates with the ability to immediately view or download any content, almost anywhere. Johnson writes,

Because [print books] have been largely walled off from the world of hypertext, print books have remained a kind of game preserve for the endangered species of linear, deep-focus reading. Online, you can click happily from blog post to email thread to online New Yorker article — sampling, commenting and forwarding as you go. But when you sit down with an old-fashioned book in your hand, the medium works naturally against such distractions; it compels you to follow the thread, to stay engaged with a single narrative or argument. (How the e-Book Will Change the Way We Read and Write.)

In other words, the shift from print books to online content, in which every page is linked to another page, in a giant web of connected content, has given readers a lack of patience. They can’t remain on one narrative thread for long periods of time. They instead jump around. They sample and move on, they glance and click. No one sits down to eat a long literary dinner any more.

Hyperlinks

One main enabler of the short, cursory attention span is the hyperlink. At the last STC Summit, Ginny Redish and Kathyrn Summers noted how the hyperlink becomes an obstacle for low-literacy users, causing them to click links randomly and lose their train of thought. Each hyperlink presents a forking path for the reader, presenting the reader with the decision to click elsewhere. If a reader is slightly bored, the temptation to move on to greener web pastures is often too much, regardless of the literacy level.

Smart Phones

Smart phones also contribute to the shift in reading behaviors. The smaller display and screen real estate on a smart phone, as well as the smaller font of the text, strain reading. But the portability of the smart phone compensates for the strain in an overpowering way, so that the reverse is also true: people read more, at least according to Peter Collingridge, a publisher of Enhanced Editions software for the iPhone.

Collingridge says that “People aren’t reading less on mobile devices, they’re reading more.” This is because “occasional reading suddenly became so much easier: on the bus, waiting for the tube, opening an app that remembers the exact place you left it for a quick literary fix becomes second nature very quickly.”

Collingridge finds that to deal with his insomnia, he’ll read his “iPhone in bed at all hours, without the need for a light” (Reading Wolf Hall on the iPhone).

Collinridge specializes in digital editions for e-books, so perhaps readers are able to enter the deep-focused reading state that Johnson describes, even on mobile. However, on my smart phone, a Palm Pre, I tend to only read RSS feeds. I can move through dozens of feed items relatively quickly, choosing to save good reads through my Read It Later app, which saves posts to Instapaper.

Reading an article longer than 3,000 words gets tiring, and I quickly feel like I’m making my way through Moby Dick. It’s a bit harder to jump and skim on the mobile device, because I can only see a two-inch span of the article. Still, I may read more content because I can curl up in my favorite position on the couch or bed and read from a device in my hand. I may lie there reading for an hour or more, but moving from feed to feed, from site to site, often in the dark.

This behavior no doubt turns habitual. Soon my reading pattern is to jump and click, moving from site to site, regardless of whether I’m at a desktop, a laptop, or holding a book or magazine. The smart phone inculcates a new reading pattern in me that favors short text.

As the following image shows, the shift in media from books to television, and then to video games, Internet, social media, and smart phones, has slowly rewired our brains. We have shorter attention spans. We prefer short texts.

Rewiring the brain through shifts in technology

Given this rewiring, perhaps we technical writers should start producing help materials optimized for this type of brain? I’ll come back to this idea in a minute. First, a few more arguments about how reading is transformed.

The Blog

In contrast to book authors, the army of daily bloggers cranks out a million short posts a day. One rarely finds a 5,000 word essay to slog through on a blog. And if you do find one, given the average literary skill online, it might not be worth reading carefully. In fact, most blog posts are re-spun cliches or ideas that we’ve already read or already understand, so skimming this content only makes sense.

Regardless of the content quality, if blogs are the new format for online content, and most are short articles (under 2,000 words), doesn’t this new standard for brevity reduce the reader’s ability to endure long, book-length texts? The more you read blog posts, the more you expect content to be short. We’re surrounded by a culture of content in which short formats are the norm.

Even critics who defend the intellectual depth of these short formats still acknowledge their brevity. Clive Thompson in Wired says, “The torrent of short-form thinking is actually a catalyst for more long-form meditation” (“The Short and the Long of It,” January 2011). His assertion is brilliantly illustrated through this simple concept diagram.

"The torrent of short-form thinking is actually a catalyst for more long-form meditation." -- Clive Thompson

Whether all of these short-form texts aggregate into long-form trends and deeper, more extensive analysis overall is beside my point. I cite Clive here as yet another critic who acknowledges the shift in formats from “long, well-thought-out arguments” to “text messages, tweets, and status updates.” These short formats may be micro-components of a collectively intelligent macro discussion. But the mere fact that discussions take place in short formats rather than long ones reinforces the trend I’m highlighting: short texts surround us as the norm.

Tags and Categories

In addition to favoring short forms of content, blogs are also structured with tags and category links, which invite readers to explore content thematically rather than as a whole. Interested in the topic of web design? Click this web design category link and peruse the available articles. Or click the usability tag and see even more specific selections on the topic. Thematic reading often spans numerous articles rather than pointing readers to a single lengthy work. You end up reading an online bibliography or collection rather than a single book.

At my work, we just released a notebook tool that allows users to highlight passages and bookmark articles as they read site content. They can add the content to a folder and tag it. The result is a chopped up bag of short content that provides a litany of quotations, highlights, and article titles on a topic. All short and concise. A reader can move through dozens of sources, sampling each article in very little time. Eventually you’ll be able to share your collections with other readers, so readers will no longer be turning to lengthy primary source material for learning. Instead, they’ll move through a smattering of individual paragraphs from dozens of sources, all compiled together in a list showing 10 items per page.

So Much Content

Never mind the type or format of content, another cause behind the changed reading behavior is the abundance of content. With a thousand new posts in Google Reader all the time, access to every online newspaper in the world, new podcasts to listen to, email to check, updates to Twitter and Facebook arriving every three minutes in little corners of the screen — it’s no wonder people have short attention spans. There’s simply no way to get through the sea of information navigating a sailboat. You need a speedboat to manage the choppy waters, with a strategy to skip and skim as fast as possible.

Lament

Despite the abundance of short text, I still lament the trend. The less I write, the happier my project teams are. If I could deliver everything in a handful of haikus, I would be the most popular writer in town.

Text in this long guide

Reduced to a few callouts

Users jump with joy

The shorter documentation is, the more likely people will read it. But at some point, brevity doesn’t translate into simplicity. It translates into obscurity. Knowing the exact point that happens – when text I’ve shortened lacks clarity and only becomes confusing – isn’t always apparent. It depends on the context the reader brings.

The same people who clipped back my copious callouts into a few marketing bubbles would have also pruned this post from 2,000 words to 200. Would that make the text more valuable? Just as there’s a balance between simplicity and obscurity, there’s a balance between length and learning. More people might read a short text, but a longer text yields more learning. Is there no pleasure in learning anymore?

At any rate, as technical writers, the era of brevity invites us to emphasize short forms of instruction. As such, I present to you, patient reader, a list of the top 10 short text deliverables, optimized for the online reader:

Quick reference guides
Screencasts (1-2 minute)
Visual callout guides
Role-based guides
Interactive rollover screen tutorials
Instructive blog articles
Online quick reference sites (example)
Laminated job aids
Cafeteria table tents
Standalone diagrams and illustrations

These formats may not be ideal in all situations, but the trend is clear: shorter guides, more visuals, and less text, please.

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Does Tech Comm Fit into Mobile Trends?

Tom Johnson — Tue, 21 Dec 2010 06:59:03 +0000

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 number of texts sent per month by US teens.

For more, see Mobile 2010 Year in Review. (Hat tip: Future Changes.)

I admit that I’ve developed a love affair with my Palm Pre. I had the phone for six months before deciding to download paid apps. Last week I downloaded Feeder, Read it Later, Daily, Angry Birds, and Tweed. My wife bought an iPod Touch last month and also downloaded a bunch of apps too.

I actually prefer to consume content, especially RSS feeds, on my mobile device. When I’m sitting down at my computer, I’m more focused on work or writing, not reading. But the mobile experience provides all kinds of benefits for content consumption — namely, it offers content in convenient places.

In all of this mobile frenzy, tech comm must figure out where we fit into this picture. With 5 billion apps downloaded, how many users asked for help files for these apps? Is this a market we should be up to our heels in? Despite the thousands of apps, no one has yet to contact me about creating help content for a mobile device — not at work, nor on a freelance basis.

This past year I interviewed two people who see mobile as a major trend for technical communication. Both Neil Perlin and Joe Welinske are both involved in mobile markets.

I think that despite the predominance of the mobile market, most apps are too simple and straightforward to need a professional technical writer. Where technical writers might be most useful is in creating quick screencasts to both demonstrate and sell the product to users. With so many apps to choose from, users want a quick preview of the functionality to see how it will work once they purchase it. The ability to create engaging screencasts (a la Michael Pick style) might be a more relevant to move technical writers forward into the mobile market.

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Breaking into the Mobile Market: Joe Welinski at the STC Summit in Dallas, #stc10

Tom Johnson — Fri, 07 May 2010 13:29:05 +0000

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.

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Trending Towards Mobile: Neil Perlin at the STC Summit #stc10

Tom Johnson — Tue, 04 May 2010 12:08:32 +0000

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.

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How to Incorporate Twitter into Your Presentation

Tom Johnson — Sun, 15 Nov 2009 07:16:34 +0000

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 responded, including the #imstc hashtag. When you include a hashtag in your tweet (placing it anywhere), you can read an aggregated view of all tweets tagged with that hashtag at search.twitter.com. After everyone responded, we read through the responses out loud and discussed them a bit.

The question I posed on Twitter

When the discussion ended, I posed a new question for them to answer on Twitter and gave them a few minutes to respond. Then we read through the answers one by one, looked at trends and discussed them for a while. We did this about 4-5 times over the course of an hour. You can read the thread here.

The technique worked well because it required everyone to stay engaged. During most presentations, you can sit back and turn on your passive listening mode. But if you’re periodically interacting on Twitter to respond or analyze a question, it keeps you awake. And as a presenter, it’s a lot more fun when everyone is engaged like this.

I’m growing tired of presentations that are little more than lectures, so I’m going to experiment with more user-led techniques like this. Unfortunately, available wi fi at chapter meetings or conferences with participants who have computers or mobile data devices is pretty rare. But if you do have the opportunity, definitely try incorporating Twitter, even if only for Q&A at the end of your presentation.