At the UAEurope 12 conference, SAP’s Keren Okman quoted a shocking statistic: that the average mobile or tablet app* is used an average of just 3-4 times by a user. The issue of “app abandonment” is one that is likely to be of greater concern for software developers in the future, as they invest ever… Read more »
Category: Technical Communication
Does looking at online Help make users forget?
Over the weekend, Dr Chris Atherton suggested I look at “the doorway effect”. You may well have experienced walking through a doorway and then finding you’d forgotten why you’d stood up in the first place. Researchers at the University of Notre Dame have discovered your brain is not to blame for your confusion about what you’re doing in… Read more »
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 »
Rethinking technical communications, rethinking Technical Authors
Our June newlsetter contains a links to a flurry of articles on rethinking technical communications. We’ve added comments to a number of these articles, and I thought it might be worth summarising our thoughts on the likely future for technical communication. Today, many products are not always “technical” A lot of technology today is part… 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?