Monthly Archives: December 2009

Where does technical documentation fit into a “Freemium” business model?

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This short video by Penny Power explains the Freemium model and how it applies to her business:

So where does the Technical Publications department fit into this model?

Traditionally, the user documentation has been given away free with a chargeable product. It’s not been chargeable in itself, but people have been required to buy a product in order to have access to it. Today, many organisations are still reluctant to make their documentation freely available on their Web site. It has meant that documentation has been seen as a cost, which has then lead to budgetry pressures upon the Technical Publications department.

Underlying this, is an assumption:

More free technical documentation = Fewer chargeable support and consultancy opportunities

The Freemium model challenges this assumption, offering the potential for:

More free technical documentation = More chargeable support and consultancy opportunities

Can technical documentation really act as funnel to more chargeable services? With Web Analytics, you can test this idea. What’s more, you can use analytics to test different ways for increasing the conversion rate from “free to fee”.

The Freemium model can be difficult for many businesses. It challenges the ideas of property, scarcity and value. If your business does find it scary, be thankful you’re not competing with Google, as it sometimes adopts a “less than free” model!

This does not mean your business should give away free consultancy. It can educate your clients in understanding what is chargeable and what is not. Indeed, it could help you with sales prospecting and qualifying, educating users to:

  • Understand your company’s skills and capabilities
  • See the value of your company’s chargeable services
  • Understand the “ground rules” between you and your prospects.

In our case, we’re always expanding our own knowledge, as well as teaching others. A key part of our company’s culture and identity has been to share knowledge willingly. It helps people get a better understanding of our company, demonstrating our expertise and our areas of knowledge. We do it to challenge people’s thinking, and more importantly, to be challenged ourselves.
 
We share what we learn and find through a number of means. We share through this blog. We share via our newsletter, for information better suited to dissemination in this manner. We also host peer group mentoring meetings for documentation leaders, and we’re members of other peer groups ourselves. If an organisation wants to call upon external advice or resources, we’d like to think they’d consider using our services.

A Freemium approach may mean that the Technical Publications department has decide what to give away for free and what (if anything) to hold back.  Alongside the technical aspects of publishing different versions and controlling access to them, it raises the issue of what belongs where and what has the greatest value. Again, this is where Web Analytics and, perhaps, usability testing can help you make those judgements.

We welcome your thoughts.

Training programme for managers of documentation teams: an update

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Earlier in the year, we asked a number of people in the technical writing community for their thoughts on what should be included in a training programme for managers of documentation teams. We received a lot of great ideas and ended up with a list of over 60 potential topics.

We’ve initiated the development of some training modules, but we’ve been wrestling with the issue of how this content should be best delivered. The questions we’ve been asking are not unique to ourselves, so we thought it might be useful to outline some the challenges we’ve been facing.

Should the way people consume information and learn via the Internet today affect the way we deliver our content?

Should we pay attention to the arguments of Michael Wesch (students of today learn differently from their predecessors) and Sir Ken Robinson (don’t kill creativity)?

 

How will new Web technologies, such as Web 2.0 and the Semantic Web, affect learning in the future?

Our training courses are in a niche market, for people with limited budget, and there are many new ways of delivering information emerging at the moment. So how do we avoid spending time and effort developing training modules that become obsolete in a short space of time?

Where should the topics fit within the curriculum?

We’ve found some topics fall into more than one area. For example, Web Analytics could be part of a Project Management (post project evaluation) and part of a Web technologies track. Wikis could fall under authoring tools, Web technologies and project management tracks.

How important is the ability to discuss ideas?

The greatest intellectual and scientific accomplishments in history have normally come about from where people have been able to:

  1. Question and debate their ideas with others; and
  2. Draw upon ideas from many different subjects.

For example:

  • The 18th Century Scottish Enlightenment (which laid down the mental foundations for the modern world) emerged from clubs and associations dotted around Edinburgh.  What’s more, their discussions ranged ranged from broad intellectual and economic topics to the specifically scientific –  again, topics fell into more than one subject area.
  • The early 20th Century industrialists in America used to meet in Mastermind groups to share and debate ideas and experiences.   

We’re experiencing a similar period of rapid change today.

Our conclusions

These considerations have lead us to the following conclusions:

  1. Learning how to manage documentation doesn’t finish at the end of a course - it’s a lifelong process.  So we’re now approaching this programme from the view of career development.
  2. Topics shouldn’t be pigeonholed into a single narrow track.
  3. There are benefits to people learning through exploration and discussion with their peers.

Is this the correct approach? What do you think?

Information overload? Study shows an average American consumes 100,500 words per day

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A report by the University of California, San Diego, found the typical American consumes a staggering amount of  information every day. The report, called “How much information?”, found:

In 2008, Americans consumed information for about 1.3 trillion hours, an average of almost 12 hours per day. Consumption totaled 3.6 zettabytes and 10,845 trillion words, corresponding to 100,500 words and 34 gigabytes for an average person on an average day. A zettabyte is 10 to the 21st power bytes, a million million gigabytes. These estimates are from an analysis of more than 20 different sources of information, from very old (newspapers and books) to very new (portable computer games, satellite radio, and Internet video). Information at work is not included.

According to Nick Bilton of the New York Times, this doesn’t mean Americans read 100,000 words a day; it means that 100,000 words cross their eyes and ears in a single 24-hour period.

The report noted a growth in reading and interactive content:

Thanks to computers, a full third of words and more than half of bytes are now received interactively. Reading, which was in decline due to the growth of television, tripled from 1980 to 2008, because it is the overwhelmingly preferred way to receive words on the Internet.

Copy of the press release

Download the report

Words of 2009

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Here is a very unscientific list of words we’ve spotted coming into favour within the popular media during the past 12 months:

Adjectives and adverbs

  • Hefty
  • Uber
  • Trending

Nouns

  • A disconnect
  • An ecosystem
  • The Millennials (or the millennial generation)
  • The Outliers
  • Augmented Reality

Verbs

  • Hat tip (seen as “H/T”  or “HT” in messages on Twitter and meaning thank you)

Have you spotted these words, too?

Although words do go in and out of fashion, this seems to happen less in technical documentation. Will this change where we see more  user generated content appearing in technical documentation?

So you want to publish your user manuals on the Web, but don’t want everyone to see them

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We often hear from Technical Authors who say they (or their bosses) have concerns about publishing their user guides on the Web. They are worried their competitors might read them, the manuals might stop a prospect from buying the product, or that a client might not buy a support contract.

On the other hand, there are many reasons for publishing user documentation on the Web and having it indexed by the Search Engines. Apart from a better “after sales experience” for customers, it’s great for improving a company’s Search Engine rankings, as Google loves information-rich content.

The good news is that Google does offer a possible solution for these two opposing pressures to be resolved, called “First click free“. According to Google:

While the first article can be seen without subscribing, all clicks on the article page are “trapped.” This means that if users click anywhere else on that page, they’ll be prompted to sign up. This allows our users to view the article of interest while also exposing them to your site, encouraging an actual subscription.

However, it might not be perfect for you. People can potentially go back to Google, find another article from the same site, click to it from Google and read that.

Google is offering additional options for content appearing in Google News search (called Subscription and Preview), but these aren’t available in the main Google Search Engine. Whether they will be added as options for non-news content is unknown.

You can also have content on your Web site that is hidden from Search Engines. Google’s Robots Exclusion Protocol options (robots.txt files or the meta robots tag) offer automatic exclusion from indexing by Search Engines. You can also hide content behind a login screen.

For more information, see Josh Cohen Of Google News On Paywalls, Partnerships & Working With Publishers.

UK General Medical Council’s solution for reducing prescription errors? More usable, better designed forms

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The BBC News today has a great example of the impact procedures documents and usable forms can have upon people’s lives. It reports the General Medical Council is is calling for a UK-wide standard prescription chart as the best way to reduce the 9% of hospital prescriptions that contain a mistake. Against common opinion, the study found it wasn’t  doctors fresh out of medical school who were making the most mistakes – the causes were mostly down to poor forms and bad handwriting.  

The chairman of the GMC, Professor Peter Rubin, said:

 ”Prescribing decisions in a hospital setting often have to be made quickly, so it is important that a procedure is as simple as possible to minimise the chance of an error being made.

To avoid confusion as doctors move between hospitals with very different prescribing forms – including paper and electronic – the GMC wants to see a standardised system across the UK.

A Department of Health spokesman said it would continue to look into the benefits of electronic prescribing systems,

 ”taking into account the evidence gained where standardisation of the paper chart has been successfully implemented.”

Dr Hamish Meldrum, of the doctors’ union, the BMA, said:

“It would certainly help if there was greater uniformity in the prescription forms used in the NHS and the BMA would encourage prescribing procedures to be kept as simple as possible.”

 It’s good to see recognition, in such an important area, of the value of good procedures writing and form design.

Once more, but with meaning – how will the Semantic Web affect technical documentation and technical authors?

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Web technologies expert, John Fintan Galvin, is claiming 2010 will be the year of the Semantic Web, when semantic technologies really take off. If that is the case, how could it be used by technical communicators to deliver better user assistance?

The Semantic Web is all about the automation of connections between “resources” in a context-sensitive way. These connections can be made between anything defined as a resource, e.g. topics in a Help file, chapters in a user guide, other content, data, people, systems etc.

In the past, we’ve talked about how it will allow for more intelligent searching. 

However, the Semantic Web also offers technical authors the opportunity to automate the republishing of content (e.g. extracts of a user guide) across the Web – in all the places where this content could add real value to users.

Let’s look at some possible examples:

  1. When someone poses a question in a Newsgroup or user forum concerning ”adding a new user”, a summary of the relevant information from the user guide appears automatically in the right hand column of the Web page.
  2. When users from ABC Inc. view the online Help for Oracle 11, they see links to the topics that have been judged the most useful by other ABC Inc. staff.
  3. Users see Beginner, Intermediate or Advanced user information, depending on their individual status or preferences.
  4. When someone raises a Support ticket, a summary of the relevant information from the user guide and/or the latest status on any similar support calls, appears automatically next to the form.

In such an environment, technical authors would need to do much more statistical analysis of what users want and how they behave – both modelling scenarios and analysing behaviours. This means looking at your chunks of user information (resources) and asking:

  • What could we connect our content (resources) to?
  • To whom could we connect it?

It also means that the content will need to be stored in a way that makes it possible to categorise the content semantically and to republish the chunks of information in a semantic format.