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).
We also have an audio recording of the session, which we may add to this post later (it needs some editing and cleaning up).
With eight panel members and fewer than 45 minutes available, we were only able to discuss the first question on the slides. If there had been more time available, I would have like to have raised these questions for debate:
In the software field, has the move towards Cloud and mobile applications changed user documentation requirements?
Does the more focused nature of these applications, the improvements in usability and the improving skills of the users mean there’s less of a need for traditional User Assistance? Are users’ questions today more at a higher level? For example: how to master a subject; how to connect the system/product to something else; what is a good choice?; why isn’t this working? Does this explain the increase in the amount of API documentation and question-focused content?
We can see the move towards mobile and Cloud applications has led to technical, enabling content becoming much more important in the pre-sales stage. The User Assistance, has become strategic for marketing and and SEO reasons. The challenge for Technical Authors is can they make the change? Will it be other professionals who will be creating videos, defining the content strategy, writing API documents, writing Help embedded into the application, creating content that will be used for marketing purposes and writing answers to questions? Can Technical Authors change from being tactical to strategic? Can they convince their organisation to break away from “technical communication = a manual/Help file” mindset?
If they cannot, the role of a “Technical Author” could be limited to the person who creates only the user content that’s needed for regulatory, risk and safety reasons. The more strategic content might be carried out by people with other job titles.
If the content needs to be localised into multiple languages, or the software is being developed in an Agile environment, does it becomes almost unmanageable without a content strategy and some form of structured approach (e.g. XML)?
Does this complexity mean only Technical Authors have the skills to manage all of this?
Thanks to Adobe for arranging the Adobe Day, and Matthew Ellison for allowing it to precede the UAEurope conference.
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