Here are the slides the panel put together for the Adobe Day Europe discussion on “Assisting the millennial user – challenges and opportunities in the decade ahead”. We didn’t get time to cover all of the topics in the time we had available (unfortunately some of the previous speakers overran their time slots).
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Do let us know if you’d be interested in us scheduling another public course for our Trends in Technical Communication – Advanced technical writing techniques course. We need just a couple more people for us to schedule a course date for June. Do let us know if you’d be interested in attending this course.
For writers based outside of the UK, we’re also considering offering this course in a “live and online” format over the Web. Using Google+ Hangouts, the course would be spread over a number of days, rather than delivered as a full day’s worth of training. The price of the course would be the same. The first course would be limited to just 5 or 6 delegates. Do let us know if you’d be interested in attending this course.
In this course, you’ll find out how Technical Authors in leading companies are now applying techniques from other disciplines (such as psychology, copywriting, usability and elearning) into the information they create.
Using examples of Help pages from a number of applications (including from vendors such as Apple, Facebook, Google, HTC and Mozilla), you’ll learn how to spot where these techniques have been used, and you’ll have the opportunity to practise these in the workshop.
Do let us know if you’d be interested in attending this course.
We will be presenting “Planning user documentation when you are a startup business” at the Technical Communication UK conference in September.
We’ll look at how to plan a user documentation project when you’re working for a startup technology company. Working in this environment gives you the opportunity to work “from a clean sheet,” but it also has its own challenges of working in a dynamic and rapidly changing environment.
We’ll look at the issues around planning user documentation and the additional considerations when you are a startup. Your budget may be limited and the product or service in development may be constantly changing, so how should you work in this situation? What should you be developing, and what is the value of user documentation for a startup?
We will cover:
For more information, see Technical Communication UK conference.
You can now download our Adobe-commissioned white paper “Towards an Agile authoring methodology” via Adobe’s website.
Agile development is a way of managing IT development teams and projects that creates new challenges for those involved in providing User Assistance for those products.
You can now download our Adobe-commissioned white paper “The changing nature of content” via Adobe’s website.
“Some organizations are changing the way they write User Assistance, and are, for some content, not using the generally accepted best practices. Through web analytics and other measures, organizations are reporting a noticeable benefit from making these changes.”
Registration for our upcoming free webinar, “The changing nature of content”, is now open on the Adobe online events Web page.
You’re welcome to join us at 7pm (GMT+1) on 24th April 2013.
In recent years, technical communicators have focused on improving User Assistance through new technologies and systems, with the assumption that the nature of the content the tone of voice, the writing style should remain the same. In this free webinar, sponsored and hosted by Adobe, we’ll investigate whether the tried and tested writing methods from past decades still make sense today. We’ll look at the reasons why some organisations are “breaking the rules” with the User Assistance they provide.
You’ll find our latest post for the Society for Technical Communication on its Notebook blog. It’s called Letter from the UK: Learning from Netflix:
“Netflix can track and analyse, in minute detail, the behaviour of every person who watches a programme on its service. The rumour is that Netflix used its “big data” to decide what would be the best programme to make for its audience …. In some cases, unfortunately, technical publications teams are more in the dark about their customers than the TV networks.”
Flipboard is a popular app for the iPad and Android devices that presents information in a magazine layout.
Users can subscribe to different topics, with the content pulled in from the links tweeted by their friends on Facebook and Twitter. They can also view Web sites and blogs (if they contain a RSS feed) as an online magazine.
Flipboard has just released version 2 of its application, which enables users to create their own magazines by clipping content from a variety of different Web sites.
In other words, brands can now curate their own selections and publish these in a consistent and elegant looking format. Flipboard will create a cover for your magazine with “pull out” headlines, and it will notify you if other people have commented on the items you have included in your magazine.
According to Flipboard, since its launch, their users have been creating one magazine per second.
For Technical Authors, this means you could easily deliver online Help, training, user generated and support content in an attractive looking format.
According to The Daily Telegraph:
This latest move marks an even bigger, more significant step, taking the principle of a personalised and interactive internet, and bringing that to mainstream content delivery…This move confirms that the nature of content delivery is changing. It’s no longer about capturing crowds of many, but the audience of one. This audience of one doesn’t care about the usual magazine and newspaper release schedules, or about trawling through multiple sites to find the articles of most interest; it wants to read its favourite piece of content when it wants, and how it wants and values the curation of like-minded tastemakers, who provide a means to discover new content and cut through the clutter.
You can already view the Cherryleaf Blog as a Flipboard magazine (in Flipboard, just search on Cherryleaf or http://www.cherryleaf.com/blog/feed/), and you’ll also find a test magazine we’ve created called “The MadCap Writer”.
Let us know what you think of the potential for using Flipboard in User Assistance.
See also: Cherryleaf content strategy services