Sarah Maddox (Technical Writer, Atlassian) is another champion of engaging readers through technical documentation. Here is a video of her presentation to the Atlassian User Group Wiesbaden. It’s called “Engaging your readers in the documentation. How and why social media?” See also Reduce Support calls by engaging readers with user documentation
Category: Technical Communicators
How can you tell if it’s only beginners reading your user guides and online Help?
One way of checking to see if only new users are using the technical documentation for a product is to check if there a correlation between the number of users reading the user documentation and the sales of the product. For example, if the product is following the classic “Bell curve”, and users only need… Read more »
“Push me, Pull me” dilemma for technical authors
There are a number of posts on various Blogs, at the moment, concerning documents as conversation and moving beyond the traditional manual. Some of the comments suggest implicitly that technical authors (aka technical writers) could end up having to resolve two conflicting views regarding communicating with users. The problem is that many technical communicators work in hierarchical organisations where… Read more »
Which model of communication will technical communicators employ in the future?
About 44 minutes into his presentation, Michael Wesch talked about network size and the effect it traditionally has on the ways teachers communicate information to students. He said as the audience size increases, teachers have found they’ve had to get their students to participate less and follow more. He argued educators should and could move back to… 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 »