The debate as to whether to make user manuals available to everyone (regardless of them being a customer or not) is one that continues in the software sector. Some companies advocate it as part of a “try before you buy” product marketing strategy; others have concerns as to whether it will adversely affect their sales or their competitive advantage…. Read more »
Cherryleaf Blog
Case Study: User Documentation at Red Gate Software
Our latest interview is between Ellis Pratt of Cherryleaf and Rachel Potts of Red Gate Software, concerning user assistance and documentation at Red Gate Software. We discussed working in an Agile environment, providing a single support centre for all user information and how Web Analytics can help improve user documentation. This is the full interview, and… Read more »
How many technical authors are there in the UK?
The profession of Technical Author in the UK is yet to be recognised as a distinct profession under the UK Standard Industrial Classification of Economic Activities, so it’s very hard to determine how many people work as Technical Authors. One way of estimating the number of Technical Authors may be by looking at statistics from the USA. The… Read more »
Reducing IT support call times
At the Documentation Managers peer group meeting we hosted earlier this week, one manager commented his organisation was aiming to increase the average time for each support call. This was because it believed it could eliminate all the short duration calls – through redesigning the software and better user documentation. What would be left would be… Read more »
Fitting technical documentation into a Social Web strategy
Social Media experts, such as David Armano, of Dachis Corp, are proposing new business measures for assessing the effectiveness of social media marketing. Armano is proposing five key measurement factors: Attention: how many people are clicking on your site, blogs or tweets? Engagement: how much interaction there is between the community and you? Authority: your… Read more »