The following is a guest post by Mark Baker. The a-ha moment came for me reading David Weinberger’s Everything is Miscellaneous, a book Tom and I both admire. Weinberger’s central thesis is that miscellany has become more powerful than order. No one ordering of information is ideal for every reader. The web allows readers to find information for themselves, and to organize it for themselves … more »

In Everything is Miscellaneous, Dave Weinberger argues that classifications that we have imposed on most everything from the alphabet to the encyclopedia, planets, books, and knowledge ultimately represent our own beliefs and priorities. As time changes, we see how our own thinking at that time inclined us to organize the information that way. In reality, things in the world don’t have such clear-cut categories and … more »

With recent posts in this series, I started to raise a different question. Rather than asking, how can I help users find this information, I started to ask, how can I help users learn this information? The question you ask determines the strategy you use to organize your content. This may seem like an obvious point, but it’s fundamental in determining how to organize your … more »

For years I prided myself on single-sourcing both online help and printed guides. When I used RoboHelp, I created custom macros in Word to clean up and adjust the print formatting. With Madcap Flare, I hammered out the print styles until everything looked clean. And then I made a major mistake: I more or less single sourced the online help to the printed guide in … more »

In my last post, I argued that navigation systems can’t be entirely discarded in favor of search, because navigation helps users discover the unknown unknown. But now that we’ve covered navigation systems a bit, it’s time to move on to search, because search is undoubtedly a major way that users navigate help content. How can you organize your content so that the topics are findable … more »

I mentioned that topic-based, hierarchical navigation, which is the standard for 95% of the help files I see, is becoming a tired, less-than-useful navigation system. We rely on this system too much as technical writers, and it’s not that helpful to users. Here are a few examples to demonstrate this. I read an intriguing article today called 5 High Paying, Low Stress Jobs on Yahoo … more »

It’s easy to postpone organization. We begin writing discrete help topics, hundreds of them, and then try to group them together in a logical way. But here’s where the problem starts. What does it mean for a system of organization to be “logical”? And how does the user navigate this logic we create? Our system of organization partly determines the findability of the content. Without … more »

Let’s fast forward a year. Assume you have explored Swordfish and have hammered out a lot of help topics — nearly 200 help topics, in fact. You have met with subject matter experts and extracted critical information from them for many months. You have explored Swordfish inside and out, documenting every possible task and setting, and now you have a ton of content. The help … more »

Welcome to the new project you’ll be documenting: Project Swordfish. Project Swordfish is an application used by the FBI to train agents in virtual simulations of undercover operations. With Swordfish, users can be super agents and regular agents. The super agents can configure the permissions of the regular agents with 20 different permission settings. This means the relevant help topics for any agent can vary … more »

I’m starting a new series on organizing content. I’m not sure how many parts there will be in this series. Writing essays in a serial format is an experiment I’m exploring. Basically this approach to writing follows the agile model. I write a bit, get some feedback, write some more, get feedback, and keep going. The feedback along the way shapes the direction I’m heading. … more »

In a world of increasing social media, work, activities, and other obligations, it’s easy for our lives to become quickly cluttered. Just last week an old friend wrote and explained that she was finally listening to some of my podcasts and really enjoyed them. In particular, she listened to the podcast with Ricardo Amigo about technical writing, in which I explain some of the new … more »

This podcast interview with a professional organizer is fascinating. In Hebrew, the word “create” is the same as the word “organize.” Organization clears your mind and enables you to be more creative. Listening to this podcast made me want to clean my house and organize my closets.

The rotating flash tag cloud provides a curious approach to tags, no doubt more novel than useful, but still interesting and somewhat worthwhile. The flash cloud shows only 80 tags (any more and it’s unreadable). You can also create a comprehensive set of tags that function as an index. Both arrangements lack usability. I’m never quite sure what to do with tags. My approach has … more »