What is the minimal amount of user documentation you should write?

In researching what developers wanted to learn about writing documentation for users, the most common issue related to how much, or how little, they should write. One developer said: “I would want to know what is the minimum I should write. If you can persuade me what is the necessity of each thing I’m capturing, and… Read more »

How old are your readers?

In his newsletter last week, internet psychologist Graham Jones  mentioned research that had looked into what makes some web content more shareable than others. The researchers had analysed articles on Medium, and found there were several key factors. One was the length of the content – around 1,800 words ( approximately 7 minutes reading time). Another was… 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 »

XML isn’t the only way to semantic content

I’ve been on the road speaking at a conference this week, and I’ve been listening to a lot of presentations on technical communication. Many of these were on the importance of having structured, semantic content when you are dealing with large amounts of content that needs to be translated into different languages and published in many… Read more »