Dr Atul Gawande is currently in London, touring the radio stations to promote his book “The Checklist Manifesto“. Dr Gawande is a surgeon in Boston Mass., who has been looking at how to deal with complexity in surgery and elsewhere. He has discovered that complex systems work, mostly through people using checklists. Furthermore, no matter… Read more »
Tag: documentation
Can you design your way to a “no user documentation” approach?
Chris Edwards has written an article on product design in the E&T magazine called “The art of avoiding lemons“, in which he looks at whether there is more to product design than simply getting your design to look good or your product to work. He shows there are many situations where brilliantly designed products still… Read more »
Why you should write Help for your competitors’ products
At our “Developing your career as a technical author” course yesterday there was a great discussion about meeting the needs of “Generation Y” – the part of the working population under 27 who have grown up with the Internet. It’s a group that makes up about 13% of the working population. We talked about the… Read more »
Lessons for technical communicators from the telecommunications sector
It’s often useful to look at the economic and technological pressures in other industries, to see if the trends emerging there are relevant to the technical communications/publications sector. In recent Blogs, we’ve covered the issues emerging in education, but the telecommunications industry might also provide some useful insights. Lee Dryburgh, organiser of the Emerging Communications Conference, has been interviewed… 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 »