Cherryleaf Ltd.'s blog about technical communication and content strategy. Tel: +44 (0)207 100 4513
Reviews of two presentations at the UAEurope 17 conference.
Kristof Van Tomme (Pronovix). Software support and Artificial Intelligence.
Pawel Kowaluk (3di Poland). Knowledge Feed: Make your Online Help More Like Facebook
Interspersed with interviews from at the UAEurope 2017 conference:
Dr Tony Self. HyperWrite
Willam van Weelden. Adobe
Mike Hamilton. MadCap Software.
It seems likely Artificial Intelligence (AI) and chatbots will play a key role in helping users, in the future. Amazon, Facebook, Google, IBM and Microsoft, as well as smaller technology companies, are all developing platforms for simulating an intelligent conversation with human users.
This raises a question:
Will chatbots mean we’ll write a how-to task in the chatbot app, again in the Help, and again in the tutorials?
It’s not very productive to write the same content three times, in three different places. It makes even less sense if you need to update the content on a regular basis, or translate that repeated content into multiple languages.
One solution is to store different types of data in its native format until it is needed, and then serve that information to the AI or chatbot system. You write the content once, and “serve” it to the chatbot, the online Help, the tutorial, and so on.
This requires that content to map accurately to the chatbot’s information structure – the use cases; the user’s intent, role and sentiment; and the entity (i.e. the problem and product) that relates to the user’s question.
As a technical communicator, this means you can start by making sure your content is in a structured format. For example, it has metadata (and uses a taxonomy) that will help the AI system or chatbot know which piece of information to serve the user. This includes common metadata such as product, symptom, problem, version, user role and operating system. It may also include new metadata relating to responses based on the user’s current mood (“sentiment”), and the context in which the question is made to the chatbot.
This approach makes it more likely that your documentation will AI and chatbot ready, at the time when it’s needed.
Tryo Labs has published a useful summary of the different approaches and technologies you can use for creating chatbots. See: Building a Chatbot: analysis & limitations of modern platforms.
See also:
We’ve been experimenting with another spreadsheet for calculating the Return on Investment (ROI) on User Assistance.
We wanted to look at: how many support calls an organisation needs to have resolved by users reading the Help content instead of calling Support, before it starts to see a return on the cost of creating the Help.
Using typical costs for an average sized software application, the figures suggest you could break even if you avoided 3 support calls per week.
Contact us if you’d like a copy of the spreadsheet, so you can make your own calculations.
You also find a related Support call cost reduction spreadsheet on the main Cherryleaf website.
We’re planning to have some new laptop stickers printed. We’ll give them away to anyone we meet, or post them to anyone in the UK who’d like a sheet.
Here is the draft design:
Alternates:
What do you think of the designs? How could they be improved?
Here is an interview we carried out with Mark Baker, author of Every Page is Page One. The interview is interspersed with audio snippets from Day 1 of the UAEurope 2017 conference.
Presentations:
With thanks to Matthew Ellison and Mark Baker.
The content management and single sourcing challenges for the UK Parliament:
I understand Queen’s speech delayed bc it has to be written on goat’s skin. That takes a week 1/2
— Nicholas Watt (@nicholaswatt) June 12, 2017
However, all is not quite what it seems:
“Just when you thought Goatgate had been cleared up, along comes the official line: It is not on vellum anymore. It is on “goatskin parchment paper” but confusingly it’s not actually goatskin. However it is very high quality, thick paper, which is why the ink takes several days to dry, and it then needs to be bound into a booklet, before being sent on to Her Majesty for signing. So it did have to go to the printers last week. And the paper does have the watermark of a goat”
Prospective customers today know more about products than they have ever done. Many people tend to search for the solution to their problem on the Web and through Social Media before they buy a product or service, and many of them never even touch the product before buying it. This means the “marketing funnel” has changed into a loop. At different points in that customer journey loop, User Assistance can help people move from being prospects to be customers and advocates:
From the Cherryleaf Podcast: We ask, should marketing and technical communiations be unified?