At some stage or another, a technical communicator is likely to have seen this image from Kathy Sierra:
Category: Technical Communicators
“Engaging your readers in the documentation. How and why social media?”
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
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 »
Three Technical Communicators discuss trends in technical communication
Scriptorium has published the recording of the webinar it hosted on trends in technical communication. In this webinar, Ellis Pratt, Sarah O’Keefe and Tony Self discussed emerging trends in technical communication. Trends in technical communication for 2010 There was a suprising amount of unanimity between the three of us.
The “Beyond Documentation” Webinar videos
Scriptorium Inc has uploaded the “Beyond Documentation” Webinar Ellis delivered back in August 2009. In this session he looked at the future of technical writing and likely changes to the ways in which user assistance is delivered. We asked: Are we moving beyond documents? If so, what does this mean for technical communicators? Part 1:… Read more »