Andrew Etter has written a short, Kindle ebook called “Modern Technical Writing: An Introduction to Software Documentation“. The book is Andrew’s personal view of technical communication, based on his experience of being a technical communicator in Silicon Valley. It neatly describes the “Docs-like-code” approach to technical writing, and it challenges the impulse to write about everything…. Read more »
Category: Technical Communication
New note-taking methods for technical communicators
Note-taking is an important part of a technical communication process. A typical project can move from the account manager to the project manager, and then onto the technical communicator. Sharing information gathered at client meetings with project team members is often done through internal meetings and phone calls, handover documents written in Word, and other related… Read more »
How common knowledge disappears – customer questions & answers for a turntable
https://twitter.com/leelefever/status/792866791399698433 In the olden days, every family had a record player (also known as a “turntable”), and pretty much everyone knew how to use it. However, if you look at the Customer Questions & Answers section for a turntable currently on sale on Amazon, it’s clear that many people today don’t know how a turntable works,… Read more »
Have Amazon, Dropbox, Microsoft and Google got their information design wrong?
On an API documentation course we ran for a client yesterday, we showed a number of developer documentation websites, including ones from Amazon, Dropbox, Google and Microsoft. One common theme the delegates noticed was these sites contained a in-page table of contents, or a set of related links, on the right hand set of the screen. You will… Read more »
Towards content lakes
One of the trends in both data and content management is the move away from silos. In data management circles, there is a trend towards the collection and aggregation of customer data into “data lakes”. According to Margaret Rouse, a data lake is: A storage repository that holds a vast amount of raw data in its… Read more »