Tag Archives: Technical Documentation

Measuring the value of Help in desktop applications

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One of the challenges for Technical Authors is quantifying the value of what they produce. For example, how can you tell how many people are reading online Help when the software is installed on someone’s desktop computer? One application mentioned in passing as last week’s UAEurope conference, ApplicationMetrics, might be able to provide the answer.

ApplicationMetrics collects usage and platform data, behind the scenes. It’s a product that is no longer being developed any more, but you can still download it. It may enable you to collect “operational funnel” data that’s similar marketing funnel data – test and track whether users are going to the help and resolving their issues.

 

Come and speak at our “Trends in Technical Documentation” talks

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Cherryleaf is curating and hosting a programme of talks on trends in technical documentation. At these sessions, there’s a presentation from a respected member of the Technical Communication profession, plus the opportunity to network with your peers.

We’re looking for people who would like to present a case study or share their view of the future trends in technical communication with their peers. It’s a great place to practice a presentation you’re preparing for a conference later in the year.

Each talk is hosted by Cherryleaf in central London, and lasts approximately two hours. Spaces are limited to 12 delegates.

The first talk was held on 24/1/2012: on What will be the future for Technical Communicators if everything ‘just works’?

The second talk is likely to be on technical authoring in The Cloud (if we can find an additional speaker).

If you’d like to explore the idea of speaking at one of these talks, then contact us and we’d be happy to discuss it with you.

 

London’s “boris bikes” lack a certain something

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I decided to try out London’s Barclays Cycle Hire, known colloqually as “Boris bikes”, yesterday. There are 6,000 bicycles distributed across central London that you can hire on an ad-hoc basis.

While the scheme is a great concept, for the casual user it lacks something – information on using the bikes! Where user information is provided (on the Transport for London web site and on the payment ticket, for example), it’s pretty good:

However, I couldn’t find any information on how to book and return a bike on the docking station terminals themselves. The terminals are where the casual user pays for the hiring of a bike and receives the code for releasing a bike from its clamp:

A little bit of information at the docking station terminal itself would, I’m sure, encourage even more people to use this valuable and worthy service.

Turning a Technical Author’s work on its head

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Q. What’s the most popular wiki in the world?
A. Most people know the answer to this: It’s Wikipedia.

Q. What’s the second most popular wiki in the world?
A. It may surprise you to know that it’s WoWWiki, a wiki comprising over 250,000 articles and information. It may also surprise you to know it’s about playing a game – World of Warcraft.

So the second most popular wiki in the world is, to all intents and purposes, a user manual. And the biggest and most popular user manual in the world is (a) a wiki and (b) for a game.

We came across this fact in researching gamification and its potential use in technical documentation. Cherryleaf’s Ellis Pratt will be speaking on this subject at the UA Europe 11 conference in June, and it’s one of the topics we discuss in an book  on technical documentation trends, which we’ll be publishing shortly.

So where does turning a Technical Author’s work on its head come in to all of this?

Technical Authors spend a lot of time making life easier for users. However, according to games researcher Jane McGonigal, one of the key reasons why games are so hugely popular is because:

Games challenge us with voluntary obstacles and help us put our personal strengths to better use.

Counter-intuitive as it may seem, making the goal of finding out the answer more challenging might be more rewarding for the user. Perhaps it might even leave a greater imprint on their memory.

Instead of the Technical Author developing and providing a Table of Contents for the user, could we even see a scenario where the user creates his own collection of information and organises it as he sees fit? Could the Technical Author’s role be not to organise and arrange the information, but instead to provide (a) some (but not all) of the information and (b) a platform where the user can store and organise it for themselves? It’s an approach similar to Pokémon (“gotta catch them all”), where children gain immense pleasure from collecting cards and building their own personal battle decks.  It’s also similar to the FLOSS Manuals website’s ability for users to remix their own personal user guides.

Pokemon logo
Let’s reassure you not all the applications of games theory to User Assistance are as unusual as this. What do you think – could the concepts from games theory add value to User Assistance and could they turn the work that Technical Authors do on its head?

What price Technical Authors?

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Kevin Kelly has predicted on his blog that ebooks will drop in price to 99 cents:

I am having trouble convincing myself why digital books will not cost 99 cents within 5 years. All books, on average. Just as the price of music does not in general change on the length or quality.Here’s a reason why they’ll be as inexpensive as music. The other day Joe Konrath, a genre writer, and avid self-publisher of ebooks, said:

Eighteen days ago, I dropped the price of my ebook, The List, from $2.99 to 99 cents on Amazon. I was selling 40 copies a day prior to that. Currently, The List is #37 in the Top 100 Bestsellers on the Kindle. It’s selling 620 copies a day on Amazon.

Do the math:

$2.99 x 40 = $119.60

$0.99 x 620 = $613.8

I don’t think publishers are ready for how low book prices will go. It seems insane, dangerous, life threatening, but inevitable. I predict we’ll be there in 5 years, (before the marginal price drops to zero, but that is another story.)

Also, as others have noted, $1 is near to the royalty payment that an author will receive on, say, a paperback trade book. So in terms of sales, whether an author sells 1,000 copies themselves directly, or via a traditional publishing house, they will make the same amount of money.

If this does happen, will this affect the rates that Technical Authors will be able to charge for the work they do? When a 100,000 word book costs less than a dollar, will clients expect all forms of writing to be cheap?

Obviously we’re comparing apples and oranges. The number of people who might read a Help guide or a manual depends on the number of people who purchase the software; the cost of writing the guide is a fixed cost – the writer isn’t paid on the amount of readers. Indeed, Technical Authors are also doing more than just writing – they’re using specialist software applications to present the information, amongst other things.

On a more optimistic viewpoint, it could mean that this indicates there’s a huge growth in the number of people reading. This may elevate the status and perceived value of text over other mediums.

However, if the value of books does drop to 99 cents, will this distinction still be recognised? Again the challenge for Technical Authors will be to demonstrate their value.

Review of “WIKI: Grow your own for fun and profit”

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XML Press kindly sent me a reviewer’s copy of Alan J. Porter’s book “WIKI: Grow your own for fun and profit”. I interviewed Alan earlier in the year (which you can see on the Cherryleaf YouTube Channel), so it was good to see the book that he was mentioning in the interview.

It’s important not to think that wikis only = Wikipedia. You could argue that applications such as Confluence and Mindtouch 2010 are wikis as well – wikis enhanced with powerful tools for software user documentation, but wikis, nonetheless.

As Scott Abel says in the introduction, most organisations have yet to manage the art of managing content. They make two common mistakes: (1) they see content as either documents or structured data, and (2) they see it as purely a software problem.

Wikis offer technical communicators a handy route into an organisations for them to tackle poor content. That’s because wiki software is generally very cheap and the techies like them. There are still issues around “round tripping” (getting content in and out, and back in again) and link management, but these are not insurmountable.

Alan, I’m pleased to say, has not been seduced by the software, but has set the use of a wiki within a very usable framework. He’s spot on when it comes to the benefits a wiki can offer and the implementation approach to take.

What does a Help Authoring Tool give you over Drupal?

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Comparing Help Authoring Tools (HATs) with Drupal is like comparing apples with oranges.

HATs are used by Technical Authors to create content in various formats for end users to read. Drupal is open-source software that is used to create websites for users such that they can contribute to the content (for example: blogs, personal or corporate websites, e-commerce sites and intranets).

That said, if you are a HAT user and then have to work in Drupal, it is useful to be forewarned of the main differences. The top 3 things that a HAT user will miss when starting to use Drupal:

1. The most frustrating thing about using Drupal, having come from a HAT background, is having no summary list of pages (topics) available in a different frame.

As an Administrator in Drupal, you can view a list of pages, but you can only edit the properties of one page at a time. There is no multiple-selecting and no drag-and-dropping. So topic management can be very labourious.

2. Out of the box, there is no way of managing links. So, for example:

  • If you delete a page then all links pointing to it will break, and there are no messages to warn you.
  • When creating a link in a page you have to know the path and name of the destination page – there are no helpful lists of available pages.

There are modules you can install, which can help. The “Links” module is the most complete on paper but, in Drupal 6, it can cause a programming error (i.e. not an error in the way I installed it).

3. Out of the box there is no WYSIWYG editor. For the majority of HAT users this is a must. You can only write your content in full/filtered html.

I highly recommend installing the “Wysiwyg” module. This module makes it much easier to install WYSIWYG editors. Some of these are less successful than others. If you are interested in keeping your underling code clean (i.e. free from unnecessary <span> tags created by inline styling), I recommend the “TinyMCE” editor.