Free 11-point checklist for fixing online Help documentation problems

Get our free 11-point checklist to help you identity some of the common problems with online Help. With it, you’ll find some notes and explanations to help you answer each point on the list. We’ll also send you links to a video and two of our most popular Help-related episodes from our podcast. To get… Read more »

How you could make your Help topics appear at the top of the Search Engines

  We’ve just uploaded a video on “How you could make your Help topics appear at the top of the Search Engines”. It’s about Schema.org/HowTo, which Google is promoting as the way to get instructional content to appear in the snippets box. There is a longer version of this video in Cherryleaf’s Advanced Technical Writing… Read more »

Every Page is Page One – Interview with Mark Baker at UAEurope 2017

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: Caroline Loverage (Thermo Fisher Scientific). Teaching by Example: Worked Examples in the Documentation of Complex Systems Kelly O’Brien (Kayako). Practical Information Architecture: Building Templates… Read more »

The T-Bot: A new Help model from Microsoft

This month, Microsoft has added Microsoft Teams to Office 365. It’s a instant messaging collaboration tool, similar to Slack. Teams contains the T-Bot, which provides help and assistance to users. Users can watch videos: They can read online Help: They can read an FAQ: They can ask the T-Bot a question and receive an answer. The T-Bot… Read more »

Getting users to read the Help rather than call support

We spotted an interesting statement by the “Father of Behaviour Design”, BJ Fogg: “For somebody to do something – whether it’s buying a car, checking an email, or doing 20 press-ups – three things must happen at once. The person must want to do it, they must be able to, and they must be prompted to… Read more »