In an earlier post (Do We Need a New Approach to Help?), I surfaced concerns about the approach to help material in general and asserted that despite 50 years of innovation, most users still have the same reaction towards help: they dislike it and find it a chore. Lots of commenters agreed that we need to create more engaging user experiences. Laura Palmer added that converging instructional design with information design can be a useful ...
Larry Kunz's recent webinar, The Future of Technical Communication, is one of the best webinars I've listened to recently. Larry's message is not only on target and insightful, he also articulates concepts in a clear, organized way. It's easy to listen to and you'll get a ton of useful information out of it. Larry mentioned several trends in tech comm and then several skills tech writers can develop to meet those trends. The following are...
Listen here: Download MP3 (right-click, then Save Link As) PowerPoint Slides PDF version This is an audio recording of a presentation I gave at UA Europe in June 2013. Here's the description: Next to Google, YouTube is the second most popular search engine on the web. The popularity of video, especially for how-to scenarios, suggests that it should play a more prominent role in user assistance. However, creating vide...
Listen here: Download MP3 (right-click, then Save Link As.) PowerPoint slides PDF version of slides This is an audio recording of a presentation I gave at UA Europe in June 2013. Here's the description: Users tend to search Help material when they have a specific question they're looking to answer. In contrast, users tend to browse Help material when they don't know exactly what they're looking for. Browsing often lea...
I've spent the last few days at UA Europe in Manchester, England, where I was invited to speak. I'll shortly post recordings of my presentations -- one on findability, and one on video tutorials. Both are important topics. But there's an even more important topic I haven't addressed much: the content of help itself. Conferences usually prompt reflection of some kind, especially international conferences, where attendees are much more dive...
The singularity refers to a point in time at which technology will transform society in such far-reaching ways that it will be impossible to conceive of what life was like before the transformation. Or something like that. I actually think reflect about the directions technology is taking us now and then. When you live in Silicon Valley, where practically every company is a tech company, it kind of makes you think about the future. I rece...
June 26 update: I've had some issues with site speed after implementing Buddypress. Hold on while I figure out the best approach here. Things may be in flux a while. Most of the interesting things happening on the web seem to involve a strong community element. Think about Wikipedia, Wordpress, Twitter, Youtube, Quora -- all of these sites thrive on community content and interaction. So this weekend I decided to update a few features on I...
It's always fun / makes my stomach turn to wake up to a newsletter that starts out saying, "Tom Johnson's post Structured Authoring Versus the Web triggered a wave of responses across the tech comm community." I've been thinking about that post and discussion (1, 2 , 3). A lot of people have made excellent arguments in response and called me out on being short-sighted. One person noted that I should nuance my opinions with more notes and ...
I recently received the following question from a reader: I just found out that our next-gen cloud-based Help needs to filter content — when our user logs in, she must see only info for the products her company bought AND the role she holds. In your exploration of dynamic help, have you found any out-of-the-box solutions that include single-sign-on? Author-it Aspect seems close; maybe MindTouch, too. Zendesk filters, but can't do complex...
One of the pains in tech comm is figuring out a good collaborative authoring to publishing workflow. When you're authoring content, you're usually in the figure-it-out mode. You add pieces here and there as you learn how a system works. You gather feedback from subject matter experts, who also add comments, delete or add content, and so forth as they review the content. Sometimes the content originates from the subject matter expert and y...
In my previous post, I wrote about faceted search and faceted classification, and how facets can help users narrow information to a specific topic. Even if you've never heard the term "faceted search," you've no doubt used it on various websites, like Google, Amazon, Linkedin, and more. When you perform a search, you get a list of filters to further narrow the information. Each of the filters (or facets) narrows the results. Here's facete...
One interesting study Mark Baker pointed me to is Incompetent Research Skills Curb Users' Problem Solving on the Nielsen Normal site. Nielsen found that searchers are becoming so trusting with search results that they assume if they don't find the answer immediately with the same type of search query, the answer isn't available. They don't try different search strategies to try to surface different results. Nielsen writes, Still, the roug...
At the recent Drupalcon conference, Karen McGrane gave an awesome keynote titled Thriving in a World of Change: Future-friendly content with Drupal. (Although I didn't attend the conference, the talk and her slides are online.) In her presentation, Karen emphasized the need to transform content management systems away from the "content goes here" type of blob to a CMS that separates content from format, one that allows users to embed met...
I'm working on some slides for an upcoming presentation and wanted to post them here because they encapsulate a lot of my thoughts about organizing help content and findability. Let me know if you have feedback. I tried to create the slides as a storybook.
One challenge I've recently been considering is how to handle content re-use on a web content management system, such as Drupal, Joomla, WordPress, or some other web platform. Let's say you're writing about ACME widgets and have three different audiences: ACME developers, ACME sales people, and ACME administrators. All your help content is hosted on the same web platform. In this scenario, you have a lot of different information, much of ...
