Today, we’ll be sending out the Cherryleaf newsletter for March 2013, containing news and stories on creating clear and simple information your users will love.
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Danielle M. Villegas has just pointed us towards a five minute lightning talk by Rick Lippencott on the future of technical communication, and its value. Rick covers in five minutes a great deal of the content I covered in my 45 minute presentation at the same conference – it’s worth watching.
He summarises the value of Technical Authors in three simple words :”We explain things”.
Rick added some notes to the description on YouTube:
The clay tablet “first example of tech documentation” is about ten thousand years old, not two thousand.
The odd photo at about the 4:50 mark (where I say any of us could have explained it better) was a hotel room layout map posted at the elevators. It gave room locations based on compass points, but there was no way for the reader to know which way was actually north. It was completely useless.
“All of this has happened before, and it will happen again” was originally from Peter Pan.
You’ll find we’ve added a new training course date on our Web site for our Trends in Technical Communication Workshop – Advanced Technical Writing Techniques.
It will be held on Monday 22th April.
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Ray Gallon has recently completed a series of webinars looking at new models for providing end user Help (A Cognitive Design for User Assistance).
In the third webinar, Ray looked at how people learn today and he suggested a new approach for the future. He used The Common European Framework of Reference for Language‘s description of people’s levels of competences to outline the different ways organisations help people to learn.
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It’s been seven years since DITA (Darwin Information Typing Architecture) became an open standard. DITA, for those that don’t know, is an XML-based standard for structuring, writing, managing and publishing the type of content that you’d typically find in user guides, online Help and other technical documentation.
Recently, the DITAWriter web site researched how many organisations use DITA today. It found 372 organisations worldwide using DITA, and it also reported that 4% of technical writing job vacancies listed DITA as a required skill. The web site concluded these figures were a sign of the growing success of DITA, whereas others took the opposite view.
So where does the truth lie – is the adoption of DITA a story of success or failure? The answer lies, perhaps, within the laws of economics.
You’ll find we’ve added a new training course date on our Web site for our Trends in Technical Communication Workshop – Advanced Technical Writing Techniques.
It will be held on Monday 25th February.
The January course sold out within ten days, so it’s wise to book early.
If you’ve read the technical writing blogs and magazines, you’ll have noticed a growing interest in new approaches to technical communication – asking whether all of the tried-and-tested writing methods from past decades still make sense today.
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. The course has been designed to be independent of any particular authoring tool, and to work in both a structured and unstructured authoring environment.
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Our Trends/Advanced Technical Writing Techniques training course on the 31st January has already sold out. Sorry if you were planning to book. We had bookings from both large organisations, such as IBM, Sage and Sony, and individual freelance Technical Authors.
Given the amazing demand for the January course, we may schedule another public course towards the end of February. It will depend on the level of interest, so if you’re interested in attending this course, do please contact us and let us know.
The course would again be held in central London, close to Westminster tube station.
More information on the course content, pricing and target audience:
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?
In the quest to offer better forms of user assistance, most experts in the technical communications profession propose technological solutions: using XML, intelligent and adaptive content etc. to present essentially the same type of guidance as has been provided for the past 20 years.
We believe there has been a change in the relationship between people and technology, and there needs to be a corresponding change in the relationship between people and the user documentation.
In the past, a lot of technology was unfamiliar, idiosyncratic, expensive and complex; users often became anxious when they used a product. As technology has become part of everyone’s daily lives (particularly Web and mobile applications), people’s relationship with a great deal of technology has changed.
As a consequence, for some types of products and for some types of documents, the traditional approach for technical writing is no longer appropriate.
This means Technical Authors need a better understanding of this relationship – the psychology of users – and understand how they can relate and communicate to users in context.
We are not suggesting that the traditional approach to technical writing should go away completely. We’re also not arguing against technology such as XML and DITA – these are vehicles for delivering content. We’ll still be writing user documentation for scientific equipment and financial systems in the traditional way, as these types of products fit the traditional model. However, even the documentation for these types of products can benefit from the inclusion of some psychological techniques.
Web sites such as voiceandtone.com indicate some of the changes that we are likely to see in technical documentation, but we disagree with some of the approaches suggested on this site for some types of documents, and we feel this site only scratches the surface.
There is evidence from randomised control trials that these new approaches work, although we recommend you carry out your own testing to double check it works for your users.
So having come to be belief that Technical Authors need to incorporate some new techniques into their documentation, what should happen next? One approach is to engage Cherryleaf to provide advice or write documents. In addition, you’re able to discover these techniques through our new advanced technical writing training course. However, the starting point is to recognize the change in the relationship between users and many products, and to recognize the need to change the approach to technical writing so that it’s appropriate to the situation.
The question is, do you agree?
You’ll find a new training course on our Web site called Trends in Technical Communication Workshop – Advanced Technical Writing Techniques.
If you’ve read the technical writing blogs and magazines, you’ll have noticed a growing interest in new approaches to technical communication – asking whether all of the tried-and-tested writing methods from past decades still make sense today.
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. The course has been designed to be independent of any particular authoring tool, and to work in both a structured and unstructured authoring environment.
If you want to discover new approaches to technical writing, this one-day, hands-on advanced workshop is right for you.
To start with, we’ll be offering this course on-site or in-house (i.e. at our training centre in Central London), with public courses following later on. As an on-site course, the exercises can be based around your existing content.
For more information, see Trends in Technical Communication Workshop – Advanced Technical Writing Techniques.