Vinish Garg The following is a guest post by Vinish Garg, Director of Operations in Technical Documentation at vhite systems. When I watched the Master Chef series (Australian version and then Indian version) last year, an important lesson for contestants was to not focus only on extraordinary or most creative dishes. The judges never really looked only for creativity, fancy ingredients, and garnishing. To the judges, adherence to instr...
One of my favorite books on design is Robin Williams' The Non-Designers Design Book. The book provides advice on graphic design more than anything else, but at least one principle applies to information design as well: Proximity. The Proximity principle says you should group similar content together. Items relating to each other should be grouped close together. When several items are in close proximity to each other, they become one visu...
One findability technique commonly ignored in help applications is the glossary. A glossary defines key terms in an application. How does it assist with findability? A glossary helps users know the right words so that they can be effective with their searches. After all, how do users find what they're looking for unless they know the right words? In Designing Web Navigation, James Kalbach explains the shortcomings of search: Search is cer...
Previously, I've used WordPress plugins to style this blog's view on mobile devices, but with all the buzz about multi-device display and publishing, I decided to switch themes to a completely responsive theme. Because I use minimalistic themes, switching from one minimalistic theme to another is almost unnoticeable. But so you can see the difference, resize your browser to a smaller size. As you resize it, you'll see the navigate bar sud...
At the last STC Summit, Andrea Ames gave a presentation on progressive information disclosure. If you follow progressive information disclosure, you avoid giving the reader all the information up front. Instead, you present a little bit of information to the reader and then let reader choose to view more if he or she wants. A classic example is on-screen help text that presents a brief sentence followed by a "Read more" link, which takes ...
So far I've been exploring different ways to organize content to increase findability, but I haven't examined perhaps the most fundamental technique of all that affects how we organize and shape our content: topic-based authoring. What does topic-based authoring mean? Somewhere in learning how to be a technical writer, I was taught or assumed that topic-based authoring meant kind of the following: When you're exploring software documentat...
Contextual Navigation One of the most hotly debated topics in tech comm deals with how writers should cross reference other topics within a help topic. Some writers feel that including contextual or inline links in your help topics distracts low-literacy readers by encouraging them to navigate elsewhere. The low-literacy readers, they argue, end up bouncing from page to page, following one internal link to the next, without ever completi...
I'm continuing to make my way through James Kalbach's book, Designing Web Navigation. In chapter 2, he says the structure and format of content helps users anticipate the meaning of the content. He writes, The human visual system naturally seeks structure in information, often very rapidly. Scientists refer to this as "pre-attentive" processing. This occurs in such a way that interpretation of a display is determined by the design itself....
In Designing Web Navigation, James Kalbach starts out by asking why we need navigation at all. Technically, it's possible to put all the content on the same page. You can show and hide the content through Javascript or other techniques. Although he doesn't mention it, technical writers are probably familiar with twisties, or drop-down hotspots. You click the link and a lot of text expands below it. You could essentially do this with your ...
A Year of Writing Dangerously: 365 Days of Inspiration and Encouragement Perhaps because of my blog's title, "I'd Rather Be Writing," many people think this blog deals with creative writing. As a result, I frequently get asked if I want to review books about writing. Sometimes I say yes. Recently someone sent me A Year of Writing Dangerously: 365 Days of inspiration and Encouragement, by Barbara Abercrombie. So far I like the book. I'm n...
The first day of Confab, I attended an all-day workshop on Taxonomy, Metadata, and Search by Seth Earley. The workshop had a lot of information, much of it streamed out like a firehose through 200+ slides. In this post, I attempt to make sense of some of these concepts. Seth outlined a three-prong approach to information management: Develop a taxonomy. Apply the taxonomy to your content. Leverage the taxonomy to view your content in diff...
About two years ago, I started a series on findability because it was a topic that interested me. My goal was to write a book on the subject, moving post by post. Although I never have time to write a book, I could fathom sitting down to write a post each evening. I figured that any insightful, in-depth book would require me to write at least 100 posts on the topic. But somehow when I reached 50 posts, I came to a wall and couldn't see be...
I recently received the following question from a reader: Hello. I've read some of your blog articles and they've been very helpful. I'm interested in changing careers and am hoping to pick your brain with a brief couple of questions. First, how do outsiders learn the software that TechComm folks use? I've looked at Adobe's TechComm suite, MadCap Flare and so on, and the costs are enormous. Second, is there some standardized training prog...
User-centered documentation 1.0 Podcast: How to Create User-Centered Documentation, Interview with Joe Sokohl 1.1 → Writing User-Centered Documentation, or, My Best Days as a Technical Writer 1.2 New series: User-centered documentation 1...
My journey to and from wikis 1.0 My Journey To and From Wikis: Why I Adopted Wikis, Why I Veered Away, and a New Model 1.1 The Need for Constant Updates (Wikis) 1.2 Some Wiki Basics (Wikis) 1.3 Community and Collab...
