I'd Rather Be Writing » Twitter

Using Tags to Increase Findability

Tom Johnson — Mon, 26 Dec 2011 17:32:21 +0000

Tagging: People-Powered Metadata for the Social Web

I recently read Tagging: People-Powered Metadata for the Social Web (2008), by Gene Smith. Smith dives into tagging as a method for adding metadata to resources, which in turn increases the organization and findability of the resources.

Traditional help authoring tools categorize resources through folders (a carryover from Windows folders), whereas web platforms typically use tags. Tags are actually a quick and easy way to attach metadata to any information object.

For example, you might tag a photo with a geolocation. This would allow the photo to appear in the correct location on a map. Or you might tag a help topic with information about the audience and other relevant facets, such as role, location, goal, task/concept/reference, and so on. The key point is the tags are metadata.

Twitter wouldn’t be nearly as powerful without tags. Adding #techcomm to a tweet makes it findable for the technical communication community, just as tagging tweets with #contentstrategy makes it findable for the content strategy folks.

What’s cool about tags is that you can easily tag the same information with multiple tags. Does the information fall in #techcomm, #contentstrategy, and #findability disciplines? You don’t have to choose one folder to assign the content to. With tags, resources can live in multiple places at once.

Tags can be generated in at least two different ways. If users assign tags to topics, the result is a more free-form, loose set of terms that some call a folksonomy. Del.icio.us is the flagship example of a folksonomy. If only designated authors can assign tags, the result is more of a centralized taxonomy.

Tag clouds, which are visual displays of your top tags, can give you a general idea of topic trends. For example, if you look at the bottom of my sidebar, I frequently tag posts with the terms blogging, creativity, podcasting, screencasts, STC, technical writing, Web 2.0, and WordPress.

The tag cloud highlights only the most common terms. To see 500 tags in a cloud, see this page. When you look at this massive tag cloud, you might immediately realize one of the limitations of tags: lack of hierarchy. Most tag systems lack any kind of hierarchical arrangements (that is, parent and child tags), so as tag systems grow, they become unwieldy. The flat structure of links becomes hard to navigate.

Managing tags in digital photo collections can highlight the limitations of tags. Scott Dart, program manager of the Microsoft Photo Gallery, says,

“Anyone who has tagged their photos for any length of time will tell you that a flat list eventually becomes unwieldy. This is one of the reasons why we have hierarchical folder structures– because a flat list of folders would be too long to manage” (quoted in Tagging, 200).

In other words, the ease of adding tags to resources leads to an abundance of tags that gets to be hard to manage, unless you have some type of hierarchy imposed on your tagging systems.

Some tag clouds do allow you to drill down and explore a list of subordinate tags. Other platforms allow you to leverage tags in combinations of each other. Both strategies can make tags more useful and powerful.

Beyond tag hierarchies, Smith talks about some concepts I hadn’t heard before:

Pivot Browsing: ”Moving through an information space by choosing a new reference point — a pivot — for exploring the system” (105). The ability to look at information based on users, resources, and tags provides various pivot points in the data. Pivot points seem similar to facets but more radical in the way they change the reference point.
Pace Layering: ”Aspects of society change at different rates” (91). For example, tags suit user needs as they’re moving quickly to make sense of new information; taxonomies and ontologies are more appropriate later, when the dust settles and users have more time.
Synonym Rings: “A synonym ring gives two or more words an equivalent meaning” (69). These rings establish synonym equivalents for tags, so that “Web20″ and “Web_2.0,” for example, would be equated with one another.

Some tagging systems present users with the most popular tags, often segmented by time. But knowing that a tag is popular is just one type of information. Popular by whomis another type of information that tagging can surface. Smith writes, ”One of the benefits of tags to object-oriented sociality is to bring people together through their tags” (187). In other words, you can also connect with other users who have tagging patterns similar to you.

Tagging interfaces are characterized by speed and simplicity. As a result, tagging can be messy, with numerous tags having similar spellings, formatting, and synonyms. This is why it’s necessary to regularly clean up tags with tag management tools, which allow you to merge, delete, or change tags in bulk.

Tags have been implemented in a variety of ways with different platforms. For some examples, check out Del.icio.us, Mefeedia, Buzzillions, LibraryThing, Milenix MyInfo, Flickr, and Youtube.

Tagging is emerging as one of the most common ways to organize resources on the web. Smith notes that Delicious, a social bookmarking site that first appeared in 2003, was one of the first instances of tagging to emerge online. However, he also notes that classification and metadata strategies have been ongoing for centuries, with the Dewey Decimal system as one of the prime examples.

My Thoughts

In the larger discussion about findability, tagging brings us right back to the metadata discussion. Tagging is metadata that people apply to resources so they can find the resources later.

Tags present a radical shift in the way we attempt to organize information. Many help authoring tools default to hierarchical folder structures, but tags allow for polyhierarchy and give many more “pivot points” and facets for browsing the information.

The key point about tags is that you can add any number of them to a single resource. You can then manipulate the resources based on the tags you want to leverage. This is something you can’t easily do with a traditional hierarchical organization of information, or in systems where resources are placed in one folder at a time.

For example, with help information, you might add tags related to any of the following metadata properties:

Author
Date published
Release version
Date last revised
Popularity
Task
Concept
Reference
Format
Difficulty
Location
Event

You could then manipulate the resources in different ways based on the metadata that was important to you. You could also manipulate the resources based on combinations of tags — for example, the most popular tasks that are specific to a particular location. Combining tags provides a powerful way to sort and manipulate data, as it allows for a lot of different arrangements and possibilities.

When we start thinking of tags as metadata, they becomes a much more useful tool for help systems.

Although I’ve explored different strategies for findability, it seems that faceted classification through the attachment of metadata (such as tags) to resources remains the most compelling strategy. It can suit a diversity of audiences, purposes, and needs.

Taking it one step further, I think we need to allow users to tag help content. One failure of tech comm is that it hasn’t kept step with the innovation of the web. Many help authoring tools discard the interactivity of the web and the wisdom of the crowd. The revolution that needs to occur to pull help into the current era is to leverage the wisdom of the crowd in an intelligent way to increase the findability of help. Allowing users to tag content, and then leveraging their tags, seems like a good way to start.

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Moving from Google Reader to Twitter Hashtags

Tom Johnson — Sat, 21 May 2011 06:17:23 +0000

On my smartphone, I used to have Google Reader as one of my four quicklinks on the bottom toolbar. I recently replaced it with Twitter Topic, an app that shows all tweets that meet a specific hashtag.

For example, if I’m interested in reading about other experiences at Confab, I’ll search for the #confab topic. If I’m interested in seeing what’s new about findability, I’ll search for the #findability topic. If I’m curious to know what people are saying about the supposed Judgment Day on May 21, I enter the hashtag #judgmentday.

This switch from RSS feeds to Twitter hashtags as a means of finding information marks an important shift for me. For some time now, RSS feeds have been failing. There is simply too much noise to make sifting through the 1,000+ new RSS items worth the while. With Twitter Topic, I usually find relevant content immediately.

The fundamental flaw in subscribing to an RSS feed is that one’s blog will focus on a specific area of interest and always deliver interesting content on that topic. In reality, people post about a lot of different topics, even in a narrowly defined niche. One day I may post about semantic structuring of wiki content, another day I may write about an experience at a conference, another day I might post about a WordPress tip, and another day I might tell you about my content curation strategy, and so on. Multiply that variety by 500 different RSS feeds, and you end up with a lot of content variety. Too much unfocused variety just comes across as noise.

Unless you enjoy reading miscellany, or unless your RSS subscriptions are limited just to people you know, RSS feeds will probably fail as you increase the number of subscriptions. While Twitter has a much higher noise ratio if you just look at unfiltered tweets of whomever you’re following, Twitter also has a higher potential to reduce the noise through hashtags. These hashtags are really metadata applied to content. It makes a huge difference in findability.

Today it’s more important than ever to tag your information with the right metadata if you want to be found. When you send your post titles across Twitter, add the necessary metadata (hashtags) so that people can find your content. Subscribing to a blog isn’t such a priority any more, because subscriptions only yield more and and more RSS glut.

RSS feeds aren’t a total throwaway, though. You can still highlight your feeds based on keywords. You can also apply smart filters using tools such as Yahoo Pipes to filter out content. The only difference is that one or two keywords may show a post as being relevant, when in fact the keywords are only minor tangents in the article, not the main focus. That’s why I like the Twitter hashtag: it’s often a stronger form of metadata.

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Trends in Search Engine Optimization — Shifting from Search to Social?

Tom Johnson — Tue, 01 Mar 2011 03:35:13 +0000

In The Big Shift from Search to Social, Anne Gentle notes the growing problem with Google’s search and trends towards alternative search sources, such as social networks like Facebook. She links to an stirring NY Times article called The Dirty Little Secrets of Search, which I recommend reading.

The Dirty Little Secrets About Search, from the NYTimes

The NYTimes article exposes how search engines are gamed, and how search engines can also game consumers.

As the NYTimes article points out, the strategies for gaming search engines often involve buying links pointing to your site. I’ve encountered a bit of this myself. Last week a “reader” offered to write a “guest post” for me on Wikipedia’s credibility issue, and how Wikipedia manages this risk. The guest poster only requested that in exchange for the completely unique post, he be allowed to include a “personal link.” When I received the post, it turned out to contain a link to an online university site. I turned the article down, not only because it wasn’t relevant to my blog, but because I get at least one person a month pitching a guest post with a link to an online university.

I’ve had offers from other companies to run text ads in my blog. Several years ago I made about $1300 just adding text links to website companies on about 20 old posts. Recently the same person returned to pitch more text ads to an exam-answers site, which I turned down for obvious ethical reasons. But regardless of the site, running text ads isn’t a good practice — if Google finds out, they could penalize your Pagerank.

Pagerank is always a bit of a mystery, but ever since MindTouch came out with their 20 most influential bloggers, and showed Scott Abel’s The Content Wrangler with a Pagerank of 7, and my site with a Pagerank of 5, I started to worry about the effect of those text ads. I removed them (I think they expired anyway), and after several months my site’s Pagerank is now a 6. Part of Scott’s Pagerank is due to the longevity of his site, I believe. He’s been online probably longer than most any other technical communicator. Also, he does post excellent, in-depth content — rich with search engine keywords.

Although Anne notes that Facebook visits surpassed Google visits, I’m not sure if this is an apples versus oranges argument. Are people turning to Facebook and other social networks primarily to find information, or for social engagement? I occasionally search for keywords on search.twitter.com, especially if I’m looking for something occurring now. But as a general means of finding information, I almost never search social networks.

However, when I can’t find information, perhaps because the search engines are gamed with all kinds of J.C. Penney type schemes, then yes, turning to social networks is a good idea. For example, last Friday I googled how to create a screencast of an iPhone app, and not finding anything on Google, I turned to Twitter. But other than turning to social networks as a last resort, for me social networks primarily serve social purposes, and search engines primarily serve search purposes.

What does this all mean for technical writers? We keep hearing that technical writers have a goldmine of SEO-rich content, and that companies need to leverage the search engine results and financial benefits that will come from putting this content online in the realm of user search. SEO and web platforms should play a larger consideration in how we author help material — particularly if our audience is external. It’s usually more than enough, though, just worrying about accuracy, concision, and content approval. Now if you add good SEO practices to the mix, you have a lot going on in each topic.

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Making Help Content Enjoyable to Read — Impossible Quest?

Tom Johnson — Tue, 25 Jan 2011 06:18:59 +0000

In my previous post (“Less Text, Please”), I argued that users want shorter texts. I also explained how social media and Internet sites have possibly rewired our brains to incline us toward shorter content — according to some, our gnat-like attention spans can only consume a few short paragraphs before tapping out. The Onion has a great parody of how a single block of uninterrupted text causes mayhem for readers (“Nation Shudders at Large Block of Uninterrupted Text”).

But while short texts are met with smiles and cheers, many of my blog’s readers suggested that raising up a standard of brevity may be misguided. In fact, in many contexts, readers don’t mind long texts. What readers truly want, they explained, is simplicity, and simplicity is not always achieved through brevity.

As long as we strive for simplicity, illustrate our ideas, and focus on business relevant content, perhaps even the most technical user’s guide (such as a Network User’s Guide, shown below) might become as pleasing to read as a novel.

Is it possible for help content to be as pleasing to read as a novel?

(Drawing based on a photo of Clark Gable.)

Reading Modes

First we must distinguish between two critical modes of reading: reading to do and reading to learn. The distinction between these reading modes is an idea from Ginny Reddish (which Caroline Jarret expands on here). If you’re reading to do, you’re searching for an answer to a specific question.

Here’s an example of reading to do. You’re giving a presentation using PowerPoint, and 10 minutes before your presentation, you’re trying to figure out how to separate your slide notes from the projected slide display. In this scenario, lengthy help text is your enemy. You want the answer in as brief a space as possible, and as quickly as possible. You’re reading to do.

Ginny explains this mindset in one of her slides:

From Ginny Redish -- reading to do

(See “Understanding Web Readers (and Non-Readers) — Creating Usable and Effective Web Content.”)

I’m sure you can guess which guy in the above slide has a PowerPoint presentation in 10 minutes. But consider this other learning scenario. You know you need to improve your presentation abilities, and you’re tinkering around with Microsoft PowerPoint. There are so many buttons and features on the ribbon. It’s really overwhelming. You’re not looking to learn a specific feature, just the tool in general. You may have set aside 20 minutes a day to learn PowerPoint. In this case, you’re reading to learn.

Help content will never approach novel-like pleasure reading when a user is operating in the first mode: reading to do. But in the reading to learn mode, there is potential for something other than the frantic, frustrated help-cursing mode.

In Reading to Learn Mode, Length is Irrelevant

Let’s stay in the reading to learn mode. As long as the content is business relevant, entertaining, and simple to understand, there’s no reason to doubt the reader’s ability to become immersed in the content for long periods of time. Length becomes much less of an issue in this mode.

I don’t have hard evidence for assertions about length, but in Wired, Clive Thompson notes that the most popular blog articles are about 1,600 words per post (“Clive Thompson on How Tweets and Texts Nurture In-Depth Analysis”). This is about a seven-page essay. Writer/editor Tim Rich notes an eye-tracking study from Poynter showing that users skim until they find relevant content, and then they read for longer periods of time. Many other readers tell me they regularly consume long novels, and even wish the novels were longer.

Clearly in some contexts, length is not a problem. When content is interesting, you can have it any length you want. In one of Tim Rich’s posts, he quotes comedian Jerry Seinfield, who says, “There is no such thing as an attention span. People have infinite attention if you are entertaining them” (“Attention Spans”).

I think most will agree that text can be long and still be acceptable to readers. However, the real question is whether help content can be long and still be acceptable to readers. If not, why?

Is the Genre of Pain an Exception?

Let’s consider a basic reality. Help content is in the genre of pain. It’s right next to the tax code, your car manual, and a trip to the dentist. But does help always need to be trapped into a category of boring text no one wants to read unless they absolutely have to? Must it always be on par with a trip to the dentist?

Going along with the dentist metaphor, can the dentist ever change the experience so that you actually prefer to lengthen the visit? His fundamental activities, drilling, sticking his hand in your mouth, doing painful things to your teeth — it’s never something you want to prolong. Just like the tax instructions, no one wants the experience to be any longer, for goodness sakes. The last thing we want to do is extend the pain, right?

But Shorter Does Not Mean Less Pain

Although we do not want to prolong the pain, shorter is not always less painful. In fact, sometimes brevity increases pain. Imagine a tax booklet instruction that was just two paragraphs long. To the accountant writing the instructions, trying to keep it “as simple as possible, but not simpler,” as Einstein says, he or she may look at the concise set of instructions and feel satisfied. But this concision will likely leave me in the dark. I’ll end up scratching my head trying to understand terms, wondering if I’m interpreting it correctly, wishing there were some more examples and clarification. The time I save with shorter text is balanced by increased confusion time afterwards.

What we really want isn’t brevity. What we want is simplicity. As Whitney Quesenbery points out, “the repeated complaint about ‘too many words’ isn’t really about the word count, but about the density of the information and how this makes us feel about the information.”

When you hand users a two-page quick reference guide, their faces light up with excitement because they think the application must be simple. Project managers are cheering as well because the brief instructions seem evidence of a simple application, which means they did something right.

A sample quick reference guide. Users assume shorter means simpler, but that's not always the case.

But in reality, a two-page instructional document (such as the one on the right) for a complicated application may only leave users confused. As users make their way through the quick reference guide, they may encounter even more frustration than they would with a longer guide.

In a world of extreme concision, the novice user may be especially lost, like a hiker with a dim flashlight trying to navigate out of a rough patch of woods. The dim flashlight may be small and easy to carry, but in this situation wouldn’t the hiker prefer a larger floodlight instead?

As I said, what users really want isn’t brevity or shorter texts. They want simplicity. Who wouldn’t mind a 20 page guide if it were full of clarifying illustrations, examples, screenshots, and maybe even a glossary?

Illustrations and Simplicity

If simplicity is the goal, not brevity, you can implement a variety of techniques to simplify concepts. One of the most important strategies will be illustrations. Nothing clarifies a concept more than accompanying it with an illustration that drives the point home.

Before I push illustrations too much, let me start off with a caution raised by Tim Rich. Rich says,

There are times when a striking image expresses something in a more powerful or accurate way, but there are also countless occasions when words are an extraordinarily moving or precise media, when words can do more, say more, show more or achieve more (“On Pictures and Prose”).

In other words, images are often overrated in their ability to communicate information. A well-written paragraph full of description can sometimes communicate more information than an image. But without getting into semantic contests between text and images, I think we’ll all agree that combining the two is almost always a winning strategy. To keep the reader’s attention as you move through concepts and strategies, insert a concept diagram on every page, separating blocks of text.

A concept diagram explains a concept visually rather than merely decorating the page with a pretty picture. The concept diagram reinforces an abstract idea through visual means. Here are a few sample concept diagrams from Robert Horn’s Visual Language: Global Communication for the 21st Century (p.60).

Concept diagrams from Robert Horn's book on Visual Language

As you can see, you don’t need to be a great artist to create a concept diagram. All you need is some basic graphics abilities and an idea of how to communicate your ideas.

If illustrations are so helpful in simplifying concepts for users, why don’t more technical writers illustrate their help? Several reasons:

Lack of graphic design skills (or feelings of inadequacy in a world of professional expectations).
Lack of conceptual material to illustrate (it may all be procedural).
Not enough time to create the illustrations you need.
Difficulty in coming with a clever way to depict an abstract idea.

All of these reasons contribute to a text-heavy help. But if writers were to focus more effort on illustrating help content (and not in an Ikea-like way), you would see a complete turnaround in the reception of help content. Length would become less of an issue, and readers would welcome help content openly rather than resisting it at every level.

Screencasts

Illustrations aren’t the only solution to helping users learn a complicated process. Videos are also key. A simple screencast takes just several hours to produce. The dynamic visual interface combined with your human-narrated voice can have a powerful influence on user learning, since it allows users to see tasks in the context of an interface.

I’ve written about screencasts and voiceover techniques at length on my blog, so my purpose here isn’t to explain techniques, but merely to suggest that writers include more screencasts. Screencasts should be a more common deliverable than they currently are. Right now, based on my interactions with other professionals, I’m guessing only 1 in 10 technical writers creates screencasts, even though screencasting software applications such as Camtasia Studio or Jing are simple to learn and use.

Relevant Content

Another element required to convert help into a more pleasing reading experience is to focus on relevant content. A lot of times, we technical writers explain how to use a software application, but we leave the details of the particular business context alone. I know that when I worked as a technical writer for a financial firm, I rarely wandered into business context and use, preferring instead to merely describe how to do various functions in the application.

Why didn’t I describe more of the business use? Financial analysis is complicated, and uses are multiple. I clearly ran into the edge of my knowledge of the subject matter and didn’t feel comfortable getting into more in-depth business strategies and uses.

However, often the business context is more important than mere how-to within the interface. Many users, especially tech-savvy ones, can get the hang of an application easily enough. Look at even the simplest of apps out there — Facebook and Twitter. People aren’t clamoring for instruction on how to post updates to these web applications. Instead, users are confused about how or why they should even use the applications at all. In what contexts would they be useful or strategic? Why is it that nearly everyone has a Facebook account, but only a fraction of these people actually uses Facebook? Same with Linkedin and Twitter. The instructional material about business use and strategy is perhaps lacking (or unpersuasive).

Most help material has the same problem. The writer explains how to run a report, for example, but doesn’t say why the report might be useful, or how you might interpret the report, or who would be the most relevant audience for the report.

As another example, look at Google’s Chrome comic documentation.

Chrome's comic documentation failed for me because it lacked business relevant content.

When this first came out, it looked cool. I tore into the first few pages with a new-found enthusiasm, because this format seemed to open up documentation into a world where it was fun and fresh. But after about five pages, I lost interest, as did many other people who started reading it. It seemed to get boring and somewhat irrelevant, as well as technical, and so I clicked elsewhere. A cool idea, still, but perhaps not enough focus on business relevant content. (By the way, I have not seen Google produce any more comic documentation since then.)

There’s usually an entire dimension to help authoring that is missing from most help material: help about the business context and use. That’s the manual I would pay for, not the simple how-to about tasks already intuitive in the interface. And when you start delving into relevant business content, you have the power to keep a user’s attention at length.

Conclusion and Disclaimer

I’m not saying all help material needs illustrations, screencasts, and business relevant content, because every application or project is unique, and clearly generalizations don’t always apply. But as a guideline to follow, help could be a lot better if it more often contained these elements.

If you do include illustrations, screencasts, and business relevant content, you might not need to worry so much about brevity and word count. Your users won’t glance at a giant block of uninterrupted text and throw up their hands in exasperation. They may even start reading page after page with interest, forgetting about the time or page number.

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Podcast: Finding and Creating Relevant Content — Strategies for Social Media

Tom Johnson — Fri, 08 Oct 2010 06:21:18 +0000

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Length: 70 min.

In the barrage of information created by all the social media channels, how can you find relevant content? How can you move past forms of noise to actually produce content that engages users? What forms of social media do students respond to the most? These are some of the questions we explored in a presentation I gave to Brigham Young University Provo students earlier this week. This podcast is a recording of the presentation.

The podcast is about an hour long, and I bookended the presentation with some thoughts before and after.

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Separating Basic from Advanced Topics: How Twitter Organizes Their Help [Organizing Content #18]

Tom Johnson — Thu, 08 Jul 2010 14:23:21 +0000

When you click Twitter’s help link, the help content is divided into three categories:

Twitter Basics
Something’s Not Working
Report a Violation

How Twitter organizes their help content

This division suggests a mental pattern about how people use help. You have the newbie group. These people are new to Twitter and need a grounding in the basics, such as what an @ reply is versus a dm. The content in this section, Twitter Basics, is simple and avoids focusing on the pain points; instead it focuses on the fundamentals.

The Something’s Not Working section lists specific problems users have encountered. The topics in this section are more of a random list of issues users have probably logged as support tickets.

The third column, Report a Violation, also has a surprising number of advanced topics. It’s more than simple violation reporting. More than 50 different topics are listed on that page.

Evaluating the Organization

Twitter’s model for organizing help content seems reasonable. But it fails to consider a point Kathy Sierra made several years ago in her post, The best user manuals EVER. She says that if you have a note or tip or FAQ about a specific topic, that content should be grouped in with other content on the same topic. Kathy expresses this point well through a couple of diagrams:

Group similar content together.

Keep similar content in one place.

Twitter’s help doesn’t follow this principle. Basic topics are in the Basic section — for example, How to Change Your Profile Picture or Information is in the Basic section. But a similar topic, I Can’t Update the Profile Information for My Verified Account, appears in the Something’s Not Working section. Should these topics be grouped together in one place? In other words, should basic and advanced information for the same topic be in one place?

Centralizing or Separating?

One advantage to centralizing topic content in one place, as Sierra recommends, is the search engine optimization that results. If a page has more keywords, it will rank higher in the results. A user searching for information might have better luck finding the page if the page is more keyword rich.

On the other hand, shorter topics usually have more pointed topic titles that rank higher in search results because the keywords are found in the title rather than the content body.

Overwhelming or Disappointing

Another consideration in centralizing or separating out content is whether you would rather overwhelm new users or disappoint advanced users. If you group all content together in one place, you may end up overwhelming the new user. What would normally be a simple task, such as Signing In, can have a dozen sections associated with it, if signing in happens to have a lot of troubleshooting notes and other tips, quirks, or issues. This abundance of topics can overwhelm new users and make them feel that the application is more complicated than it really is. This is one argument for separating out basic from advanced content.

However, separating out the complexity from the help will most likely disappoint advanced users who will now have a harder time finding the answers they need in the help. When an advanced user looks for help about signing in, they’ll be scattered in their search because the information about signing in isn’t in one place. The organization in the Advanced section could parallel the same organization in the Basic section, but then the advanced user would be left to guess whether the topic was basic or advanced.

From Neatness to Chaos

When you peruse the Something’s Not Working or Report a Violation sections in Twitter, you’ll see that they tend to lose their tight organization and look like a jumble of questions and problems, as shown in the image below.

Advanced topics lose their tight organization

Advanced topics tend to look this way — a loosely organized list of randomly worded topics. In contrast, the topics for the basic section are tightly organized with parallel verbs.

It seems that you can’t have both. Either you have advanced topics mixed with basic topics and end up with a semi-chaotic looking organization. Or you separate the two and maintain clarity in the help but introduce more problems with findability.

One Way to Resolve the Separation

One way to resolve this grouping basic and advanced information is to provide a list of advanced/troubleshooting topics as links in the sidebar next to the basic topics. For example, in the following topic, How To Change Your Profile Picture or Information, you could list the advanced/troubleshooting topics in the sidebar as Related Links.

Put advanced or troubleshooting topics in a sidebar as links

Twitter already does this to some extent, but the Related Articles mostly pull from the Basic section.

Conclusion

Overall, determining how to organize basic information along with advanced information poses one of the main challenges with content organization. Online platforms allow more possibilities for grouping similar content together without overwhelming the user, since you can rely on links to go directly to the content. Printed content would probably resort to cross references from one section to another. But regardless of the medium, there is no clear approach for integrating basic and advanced content.

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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.

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The Seven Sins of Blogging, Sin #6, Being Unfindable

Tom Johnson — Sun, 18 Oct 2009 17:56:20 +0000

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Length: 25 min.

The sixth sin in my ongoing series on the Seven Deadly Sins of Blogging is being unfindable. (The other sins include being fake, irrelevant, boring, unreadable, irresponsible, and inattentive). Admittedly, lack of findability seems more a sin of omission than commission. Being unfindable seems like a sin bloggers commit against themselves.

I’ve written more than 1,000 posts on my blog, but usually the posts on my home page are the only posts people read. In this sense, blogs are like the news. A newspaper that’s several days old lines bird cages. Reading blog archives is like reading yesterday’s news — there’s no appeal.

And yet, many times archive posts have more substance that news commentary. The posts incorporate research and get into issues in depth. They don’t deserve to go into the garbage can once they slide off the home page.

Michael Arrington of TechCrunch.com compares blogging to reaching down and grabbing a handful of sand. The sand slowly slips through your fingers. You have to reach down and grab another handful of sand, and another, and another. In the metaphor, your readers are the sand; your reaching and scooping — those are the new posts. Perhaps if the content were more findable, you wouldn’t have to do so much reaching.

How can you enable readers to naturally find the content in your archives? How can you make the hundreds of posts you write more visible and prominent, especially if readers are looking for it? This is partly what the field of findability is all about.

Peter Morville, author of Ambient Findability, wants to move toward a world “in which we can find anyone or anything from anywhere at anytime.” He admits we might never achieve it, but it’s the direction we’re moving. To start, Morville says to ask three questions of your content:

1. Can people find your website?
2. Can they find their way around your website?
3. Can they find your content, products and services despite your website?

Aggregation Techniques

You can implement several easy aggregation techniques to increase the findability of your content. You can add tags and categories to your posts, and readers can navigate your content this way.

Tags function similarly to categories. You usually add tags as you would index keywords, including as many as you want to describe your content. Categories, on the other hand, are more like folders. You usually have only about a dozen categories on your site.

You can display your categories in a list on your sidebar, which could be helpful except that hardly anyone reads this way. And you can aggregate your tags into one of those jumbled masses of words called tag clouds. But like the list of categories, tag clouds don’t seem that useful to readers. At least I never use them. They’re merely a visual novelty.

Another way to increase the findability of your content is to add a string of related posts below each post. A variety of WordPress plugins do this for you (for example, the Contextual Related Posts plugin). Their matching algorithms vary a bit — some match by tag, others by keyword, others by custom keywords. Mostly, I think lists of related posts help searchers who land on your site from search engine results. These searchers are usually looking for information and sometimes prefer to drill into additional content on the same topic.

You can also aggregate your content through plugins that compile your most popular posts, such as the Popularity Contest plugin. Popularity is defined by hits, links, and comments. Your most popular posts may not be the posts you want to showcase, though. This is why I chose not to implement the Popularity Contest. My most popular posts are apparently posts on grasshoppers that look like aliens, a WordPress image gallery plugin, and notes from a keynote on WordPress 2.7.

You can also manually pull together your best posts. I recommend using the links feature in WordPress to manage your lists. You can also use the Section Widget (a tabbed widget) to show various lists in a compact way. Note that the tabbed section widget slows down your site’s loading time a little (I was intrigued by it earlier, but I removed it). It also seems to consume a lot of memory on the backend.

SEO

Let’s recognize a basic fact about websites. The majority of your readers — anywhere from 50 to 85 percent of visitors — find you through search engines. The web is mainly used for research, so these stats make sense.

But if visitors mainly find you through search engines, shouldn’t your content be optimized to rank high in search engine results? Search engine optimization (or SEO) should be a key influence in the way you write your posts, right?

Jakob Nielsen agrees. He says,

Web users are growing ever-more search dominant. Search is how people discover new websites and find individual pages within websites and intranets. Unless you’re listed on the first search engine results page (SERP), you might as well not exist. So, the first duty of writing for the Web is to write to be found.

Yes, you must write to be found. To do this, to make your posts SEO rich, you have to integrate the right keywords into your title, first paragraphs, headings, image alt tags, and other places (without going overboard).

However, in Google’s search engine results algorithm, links pointing to your content from other sites matter more than anything you can do alone. So more than anything, write compelling content. Compelling content invites links back to your site.

One trick that allows you to get the best of both worlds is the All in One SEO plugin (if you have a WordPress blog). This plugin allows you to make two titles: a title that Google sees and a titles that readers see.

For me, I sometimes don’t bother with SEO because I’m not sure my content would rank for a specific topic. I’m not necessarily writing just to attract more hits. Maybe with some posts, sure. With other posts, not so much.

Formats

Another technique for increasing findability is to push your content across as many formats as possible. Recognize that readers have a variety of preferences. Some like Facebook, others Twitter, others email, others RSS readers.

You can automate all of this so that when you publish a post, notification of the new post is syndicated across each of the formats. The RSS feed is automatically pushed out (if you’re using any standard blog platform). Twitterfeed allows you to hook up your RSS feed with a Twitter account. Facebook allows you to pull in a Twitter feed. And Feedburner allows you to create email subscriptions for RSS feeds.

Audio and Text

One challenge that still remains with formats is the interchangeability of audio and text. I regularly publish podcasts, and people who don’t listen to podcasts often request transcripts of the podcasts. It can take hours, however, to record and produce a podcast, and 5+ hours to render a transcript of the audio. It’s a tall order to fill just to make the content more accessible.

I believe Adobe Sound Booth will transcribe audio (though this is application isn’t free). You can also outsource transcription for about $1 a minute (and a two-week turnaround). A direct transcription of the audio, however, often sounds incoherent and unreadable.

Going from text to audio is much easier. Services like Odiogo will automatically read your post. For an example, see Todd O’Neill’s Doing Media blog. The problem with these text-to-audio services is that they’re read by a machine, so it sounds like robot. Additionally, people who are blind probably already have screen readers that perform with similar functionality. Odiogo is really designed for people who want to listen to your content on the go, while they run or drive or work in the yard.

Nevertheless, if you want to make your blog perceivable, a conversion to other formats is what Glenda Watson Hyatt recommends. In her book How POUR Is Your Blog, she writes,

Content must be perceivable through sight, hearing or touch. Since not everyone has the same abilities or equal use of the same senses, one of the main keys to accessibility is ensuring that content is transformable from one format into another, enabling your blog readers to perceive it in multiple ways. (p.6)

(POUR stands for perceivable, operable, understandable, and robust.)

Apart from making your content findable for the disabled, rendering your content into text and audio increases your reach. An hour long podcast transcribed into text theoretically gives you rich SEO keywords that will bring in many more search results from Google. (Of course, the extra time you spend transcribing the content means less time to produce new content, so perhaps it balances out.)

Mobile Platforms

Finally, as you design for different formats, make sure your content is visible on mobile platforms. Mobile browsers are getting to the point that they can display many websites well regardless of whether you have a mobile stylesheet, but it’s still a good idea to add a mobile plugin.

Hyatt recommends going to http://ready.mobi to test how your blog displays in a mobile browser. If you receive a poor rating from MobiReady, try installing Alex King’s WordPress Mobile Edition plugin and rerun the test.

MobiReady also has several emulators that show you how your blog looks on various phones.

Other Findability Tips

To wrap up findability, I suggest adding a few more simple, commonsense practices.

Let your URL match your blog title. This helps readers remember how to get to your site without having to google it each time.
Include an About page. Your About page is one of the most visited pages on a blog because people want to see information about the person whose opinions and advice they’re reading.
Use Feedburner to route your RSS feed. If you ever change platforms (for example, from Expression Engine to WordPress), you can update your RSS feed on your new site so you don’t lose all your readers who subscribed to your old RSS feed.

To conclude, remember that the goal of findability is to help your audience connect with your content. On A List Apart, Aarron Walter writes,

The fundamental goal of findability is to persistently connect your audience with the stuff you write, design, and build. When you create relevant and valuable content, present it in a machine readable format, and provide tools that facilitate content exchange and portability, you’ll help ensure that the folks you’re trying to reach get your message. A website that ignores findability is whispering into the wind, hoping that someone passing by might catch a hint of its message. (A List Apart)

Don’t whisper to the wind. Don’t let your content blow around aimlessly. Make it findable. When it’s findable, you get to keep it forever. When it’s not, it disappears into the wind.

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Creativity in the Workplace

Tom Johnson — Tue, 01 Sep 2009 13:57:05 +0000

In previous posts, I’ve explored whether technical writing is boring. Penelope Trunk’s latest post, All advice on how to manage creative people is awful, made me see the topic of workplace boredom in a different light.

Citing research in sociology, Penelope explains that “people who work are happier than people who don’t because people who are employed spend more of their time being creative.” Creativity, then, is an important factor in personal happiness and fulfillment. Most of us know that. But here’s how you measure the degree of creativity in your work. Penelope says,

Mirowskfinds that people who work are happier than people who don’t because people who are employed spend more of their time being creative

How can you tell if you are creative at work? You could just ask yourself if you like your job. It is nearly impossible to like a job if you are not solving problems that are challenging. And if you are doing that, well, that is creative.

For a more scientific gauge, you can look at your cell phone call log. If you routinely call your friends from work, you’re probably not happy at work, according to research from Nathan Eagle, at the Santa Fe Institute.

How can you tell if you are creative at work? You could just ask yourself if you like your job. It is nearly impossible to like a job if you are not solving problems that are challenging. And if you are doing that, well, that is creative.

For a more scientific gauge, you can look at your cell phone call log. If you routinely call your friends from work, you’re probably not happy at work, according to research from Nathan Eagle, at the Santa Fe Institute.

In other words, one measure of creativity at your job is whether you’re solving challenging problems all day. If you’re not presented with these problems, then most likely you’re talking on the phone instead. (Keeping yourself busy with e-mail, Twitter, IM, and other online chatter is the equivalent of talking on the phone.)

Most people consider writing to be a creative endeavor, and in some situations, it certainly is. But creativity is not just associated with writing, art, and the humanities. Penelope broadens creativity to include problem solving too.

In many ways, even though technical writing involves writing, the writing can be less creative than coding a program or creating a user interface. Technical writing can even be less creative than designing the look and feel of the online help that will house the writing. Many times writing procedural information is not creative at all, in fact. Sure, there’s a need to figure out how the application works, but once you’ve done that, merely transcribing how to do tasks in the system can make you start yawning. There are no more problems to solve. It’s mere knowledge transfer. When knowledge transfer is what you spend your day doing, technical writing loses the power of creative fulfillment.

On the flip side, because technical writing poses numerous technical challenges outside of writing, with solutions not always apparent or easy, technical writing can also be engaging. The technical side of our profession is actually what engages me more than the writing, even though I was initially attracted to the idea of writing.

I’ve been thinking about this unexpected reversal a lot lately because I’ve noticed how consuming I find technical challenges in contrast to writing. I’m drawn to problem solving with web issues, especially WordPress sites, to an almost addictive degree. When I’m working on a WordPress project, it consumes me entirely. I can easily sit at the computer for an entire afternoon or evening working on problem after problem, ignoring everything else. Building websites often includes an almost endless supply of problems to solve.

Changing how something looks is only one part of the game. Finding the additional functionality you need, figuring out the best way to organize the content, designing the navigation with usability in mind, configuring new plugins — all of these questions and problems provide engagement with the mind. For me, coming up with solutions is a creative act that surpasses the writing of technical procedures.

Fortunately, writing only takes up a small part of the technical writer’s day, as Shanghai tech writer notes. Once you’ve finished the writing layer of a project, there are countless other technical issues to address, everything from single sourcing the content to designing the online help skin to figuring out relationship tables in Flare. I used to think these tasks were ancillary to the core task of the written content. But now I realize that as far as engagement goes, it’s the other way around. The technical challenges are the rewarding, creative part.

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Why teens don’t use Twitter

Tom Johnson — Fri, 28 Aug 2009 23:18:38 +0000

Fascinating NYTimes.com article about why teenagers don’t use Twitter (linked by Eddie VanArsdall). A few reasons teens avoid Twitter: it makes it difficult to hide what they’re doing, parents don’t want teens interacting with strangers, the communication is less friend driven and more professional oriented, the tweets are better for marketing or asking questions or broadcasting ideas. Although I tweet, I certainly wouldn’t want my kids on Twitter. A kid may have a website, sure, but to actually know that people online are “following” my children would creep me out. On the other hand, the rampant texting (teens’ favorite means of communication) blows my mind. 500 in a day? Are you kidding?