Many organisations find it hard to know how much time, money and effort to put into supporting their users. There’s a competition, of sorts, between the Technical Support and Technical Publications departments over how much budget they should receive. In some organisations, these departments are also competing, in a way, with content generated by users… Read more »
Tag: usability
The business case for SaaS (Software as a Service)
Intellect’s SaaS group has published recently a paper called “The business case for Software as a Service“. The paper lays out the technical and cost benefits of SaaS, together with checklists covering selection criteria, legal considerations and comparisons of SaaS applications to traditional in-house systems. Cherryleaf made some minor contributions to this paper – so minor we… Read more »
Study shows people use search to learn as well as to find facts
Researchers at Penn State University are claiming people don’t just use Search Engines to find facts – mostly, they’re using them to learn. Could this influence the way in which e-learning courseware is developed in the future? The researchers sought to discover the cognitive processes underlying searching. They examined the search habits of 72 participants while… Read more »
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 »
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 »