Dr Atul Gawande is currently in London, touring the radio stations to promote his book “The Checklist Manifesto“. Dr Gawande is a surgeon in Boston Mass., who has been looking at how to deal with complexity in surgery and elsewhere. He has discovered that complex systems work, mostly through people using checklists. Furthermore, no matter… Read more »
Category: documentation
So you want to publish your user manuals on the Web, but don’t want everyone to see them
We often hear from Technical Authors who say they (or their bosses) have concerns about publishing their user guides on the Web. They are worried their competitors might read them, the manuals might stop a prospect from buying the product, or that a client might not buy a support contract. On the other hand, there are… Read more »
Can you design your way to a “no user documentation” approach?
Chris Edwards has written an article on product design in the E&T magazine called “The art of avoiding lemons“, in which he looks at whether there is more to product design than simply getting your design to look good or your product to work. He shows there are many situations where brilliantly designed products still… Read more »
Is the future of education also the future of technical communication?
I stumbled across another great video of Michael Wesch talking about the issues facing educationalists. Many of the problems they face are the same as those faced by people involved in producing user assistance. The video is here Dubbed “the explainer” by popular geek publication Wired because of his viral YouTube video that summarizes Web… Read more »
The “Google or Death?” choice for technical authors
July’s edition of Science magazine includes a study that shows scientific researchers are now more inclined to get their information from the Web (specifically, “quick and dirty” searches in Google) than from specialist scientific resources. If scientists are focusing on only a tiny bit of research – the bits served up by Google – what are typical users… Read more »