Category Archives: standards

Where do the new trends and ideas in technical communication come from?

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Sometimes we hear Technical Authors complain that the Help Authoring Tool vendors are not innovative enough. We believe that’s an unfair criticism, and that it’s unrealistic to expect the vendors to lead changes in technical communication. The new trends and ideas in technical communication need to come from other places.

We have moved away from Microsoft defining the universally accepted standard for online Help and the Help Authoring Tool vendors working within this framework. With no dominant leader defining the future for User Assistance, making small incremental changes is a less riskier option for the vendors. It’s safer to implement an idea that been proven to work and has been accepted by the technical communications community, than trying to make a major change and hope everyone will adopt it.

So where else will we see new trends and ideas emerging? Does technical communication innovation happen in the same was as it does in science (often in waves of rapid revolution)? Is it like the fashion industry (where ideas from a few leaders in couture work their way down to everyday clothing)? Or is there some secret body that’s making the decisions in the shadows for everyone?

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Searching for key words and phrases in training videos – Adventures in media synchronization

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One of the limitations of video-based information has been the difficulties for users in finding a particular piece of information in a video. Usually, they have to watch the whole video, or “peck and hunt” to get to the moment containing the information they were searching for.

As we’ve mentioned in previous posts, HTML5, an emerging Web standard, enables Technical Authors and courseware developers to synchronize different media. One application of this is enabling users to search a text for a key word and then start a video or audio at that point. Here is an example.

Searching for key word or phrase in a video - example

In addition to making it easier for users to search videos for the information they need, it will also mean the pages will be more likely to appear in the search engine rankings. In other words, there will be an SEO benefit as well.

Synchronizing text and video within Web pages will become a lot easier in November 2012, when we are likely to see the the introduction of authoring tools containing this functionality (at the moment you need to be familiar with HTML and JavaScript).

We believe this is an exciting development in the field of user assistance.

Writing clear policy documents

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Clear policies and procedures can have a profound effect on any organisation; they ensure that people know what they are doing, systems work properly and the people within the organisation are confident that the information in the policies and procedures is accessible, easy to understand and current.

However, writing clear policy documents can be very difficult to do.

Before you can write a good policy, you need clear decisions on which to base your writing. If the organisation doesn’t have a clear sense of what it wants to do, you as the writer will be compromised – there is only so much you can do with confusing or incomplete information. Policymakers must agree on policy before you, the writer, can write the policies.

You must also decide on your audience – whom you are writing for. The answer is often, our policy is for everyone, they all need to read and understand it. However, this means you have to write a document that must address multiple audiences with different agendas.

The temptation is to write policy documents primarily for those who audit the policies, which means the documents are often written in the passive voice. The problem with that is it can cause  a reader to become a passive spectator – they don’t ‘get’ what they are expected to do. The rules here is simple:

  • Imagine the least experienced user and write for that person.
  • Write primarily for those who need to use or implement the information.

Policies and procedures should always accomplish something – never write a policy or procedure just because it seems like a good idea. Very often policies and procedures can be knee jerk reactions to an incident. Somebody makes a mistake and someone else says “we should put a policy in place in case it happens again”.

You need to be a ruthless editor to avoid repetition and confusion across a myriad of documents. Break information down into ‘chunks’ or ‘topics’, with each topic containing one subject with a specific purpose, and then refer to (or embed) that topic in the other documents.

We’ve been working on a project to simplify policy documents within an NHS Trust. It’s a challenge simplifying a set of complex interlocking documents, but the results can be striking – helping staff understand why they should do things in a certain way and what the organisation is aiming to achieve.

Tackling the challenge of writing sales proposals and RFQs

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Standards and processes permeate nearly every area of business today. They enable management to control, direct and delegate, giving people the ability to focus attention on the more difficult issues the business faces. Processes drives predictability, consistency and efficiency.

Despite all these benefits, sales departments have been much slower to move down this path. Sales people usually baulk at the idea of processes, complaining that “form-filling gets in the way of actual selling”.

Yet, according to Dario Priolo and Bethany Schultz, from sales training company Miller Heiman,

Our research clearly shows that “Winning Sales Organizations” take a much more scientific approach to selling and sales management than others. While there will always be a certain art to selling, it’s an increasingly sophisticated business world…How much better would a CEO sleep at night if he knew his sales force had a consistent, professional approach to interacting with customers! An improvement in these factors helps drive revenue predictability, reduces cost of sales and increases sales force productivity—all critical business objectives.

Miller Heiman argues that a sales process can help sales people “sell more and sell faster”.

Any successful initiative must include tools to streamline the process and remove any barriers to change. In this context, it makes sense to streamline one of the most time consuming aspects of selling – responding to Request for Quotation and other forms of sales proposals.

As we mentioned in our post “Building intelligence into business documents“, it’s now possible to create a system that can build the bulk of the document in a matter of minutes, leaving the writer with the task of customising the information to suit the requirements of each particular situation. These systems can even include training videos and text to guide a writer through the process of developing a new document, as well as enforce consistency and standards.

In the near future, we’ll be providing details on some the solutions available to organisations that want to improve the process of writing sales proposals and RFQs.

Please welcome guest blogger Malcolm Tullett

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We welcome our latest guest blogger, Malcolm Tullett. He runs a fire, safety and environmental consultancy and training company called Risk and Safety Plus, and is the creator of PROPA.

Malcolm’s mission is to spread the word that risk and good business are not mutually exclusive – they are simply two sides of the same coin. He’ll be blogging about business processes and communicating change within an organisation.

Malcolm Tullett

PROPA is a concept that won an Institute of Engineering Technology (IET) award for innovation. It has now been developed into a online intelligent operations manual that drives efficiency and effectiveness whilst seamlessly addressing compliance. PROPA presents end-to-end process mapping that enables you to analyse risk areas before an event and has the capability to actively change a process to mitigate risk and deliver quality data for business operations. Contact us for more details.

Welcome Malcolm!

Your online grammar reference guide

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We’ve added a link on our Web site that will take you to the online grammar reference guide offered by Grammar to Go.

Built for business, Grammar to Go is your personal grammar specialist, ready to answer your questions wherever and whenever they arise.

It is very popular with professionals who spend their valuable time correcting errors in English before they can review reports and other documents.

How much time do you imagine is wasted on this? 

17 days to better grammar

You can sign up for a free piece of expert advice in writing skills every day for 17 days. It’s a great way to check your knowledge of correct English.

Help in the clouds

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Earlier this week, Google announced the launch of the Google Apps Marketplace, promising a one-stop shop for Web-based applications.

Organisations will be able to build their individual suite of Web-based applications that integrate with Google’s own applications (for example, its word-processor and email applications). The idea is that you’ll have “best of breed” applications from a range of suppliers, rather than a suite from just one vendor.

Google are likely to be followed in this field by Microsoft and others. For example, the UK government has initiated the G-Cloud initiative, allowing local and central government departments to share centrally hosted applications.

So will there be a “best of breed” user interface for users, or will it be a messy hodge-pot of different user interface designs? What’s more, how will the user assistance, online Help, be provided across each individual suite?

It appears, in Google’s case, the integration is limited – data and logins will be shared, but there are no rules for how the UI or user assistance is delivered.

Google’s “Listing Approval Checklist” only covers these points:

1.Verify your product or service utilizes a Google Apps API or Google Apps product
2.Verify your listing and product follows Google’s branding guidelines
3.Verify your listing links to a web site that relates to the product or service in the listing
4.Review the Listing Policy FAQ

Having no policy (over the UI and UA) may not matter. However, it could be the Apps Marketplace’s Achilles’ heel. Perhaps this will provide an opportunity for any enterprising Help Authoring Tool vendors out there.

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.

Google Chrome OS Help – What will it be like?

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Techcrunch has reported on an early glimpse of Google’s upcoming Operating System, Chrome OS. So, you are no doubt asking, will Chrome OS come with online Help? Will it be initiated in a similar way to Help in Windows or by some sort of new means?

From the screen shots on the Techcrunch site, it appears, yes,  there will be online Help. It will be initiated by clicking on a ? button in the top right hand corner. In short, it appears Google will be sticking to standard User Interface conventions. What’s unclear is whether the Help pages will be stored locally on the machine or “in the cloud”.