Any user guide, as long as it’s black

At last week’s UAEurope conference (and in this season’s Communicator magazine), Dr. Tony Self suggested how car manufacture can be an allegory for the technical communication profession. Henry Ford revolutionised car manufacture when his production line replaced the method where cars were hand-made by artisans. Famously, Henry Ford offered the Model T in “any colour…… Read more »

A help system with 3 million readers, 800K edits and 3K comments

At this moment, Autodesk’s Web based Help system statistics stand at: 3,166,604 visitors (since 1 Feb 2011) 31,268 registered users 388,517 pages 4914 videos 3,282 comments 815,966 page edits 2,333,219 all contributions More at  Irregular Enterprise Would you like your Help system achieve similar results?

How to build a multi-million dollar business by putting manuals on the Web

One of the issues we’ve been promoting for many years is the importance for Technical Authors to publish their user guides and online Help on the Web. A surprisingly large amount of companies still don’t offer Web versions, for reasons that include: It’s too difficult Our competitors might read it and reverse-engineer our product Support/Training/Marketing… Read more »

User documentation from an accountant’s perspective

My first job out of college was in financial auditing, and I’ve often found the time I spent learning the ways of the accountant useful in understanding business fundamentals. So how does User Assistance (user documentation) appear through the prism of accountancy? Is it an asset? Assets are things you buy that have a value… Read more »