Here is early access to the latest episode on the Cherryleaf Podcast – Interview with Anne Gentle, author of Docs Like Code and Product Manager at Cisco. It will be published on the podcast channel on Monday. Topics covered: What is docs as code? Why do it? When might this approach might be applicable? The limitations… Read more »
Tag: Technical Documentation
Is your documentation AI and chatbot ready?
It seems likely Artificial Intelligence (AI) and chatbots will play a key role in helping users, in the future. Amazon, Facebook, Google, IBM and Microsoft, as well as smaller technology companies, are all developing platforms for simulating an intelligent conversation with human users. This raises a question: Will chatbots mean we’ll write a how-to task in… Read more »
The ROI of user documentation: you could break even if you avoided 3 support calls per week
We’ve been experimenting with another spreadsheet for calculating the Return on Investment (ROI) on User Assistance. We wanted to look at: how many support calls an organisation needs to have resolved by users reading the Help content instead of calling Support, before it starts to see a return on the cost of creating the Help. Using… Read more »
Just in time documentation – some pros and cons
Bri Hillmer has written two articles on Just-In-Time documentation (https://www.knowledgeowl.com/home/just-in-time-documentation-a-practical-guide and https://www.knowledgeowl.com/home/just-in-time-documentation). This is an alternative to what she called Just-In-Case documentation. The idea is you write topics that answer real world queries users ask the Support team. This rather than writing a comprehensive user guide, just in case someone wants to know about topic… Read more »
Is documentation a dirty word?
Daryl Colquhoun has written an article in tcWorld about the international standard ISO/IEC/IEEE 26512. He explained the standard is going to be revised and renamed: from “Systems and software engineering – Requirements for managers of user documentation” to “Systems and software engineering – Requirements for managers of information for users”. The reason for this, he states, is… Read more »