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 »

How technical documentation helps the customer journey

Here is a diagram that shows the different types of User Assistance that can help users as they progress through the customer journey: Supporting the user through the customer journey has become more important, partly because the subscription, “try before you buy”, sales model means users can stop being a paying customer at a moment’s notice. Today, all… Read more »

A technical communication user’s hierarchy of needs

At the TCUK 2015 conference, Rachel Johnston mentioned the idea of a content maturity model. We thought we’d take this idea and ask: Could we develop a model that illustrates a hierarchy of needs for users of technical communication (and in particular, User Assistance)? A model of what? We suggest calling this model a technical communication user’s hierarchy of needs…. Read more »

Design-led technical documentation

Peter J. Bogaards posted a link on Twitter yesterday to an article and a press release on how IBM is adopting a design-led approach to software design. “IBM Design Thinking is a broad, ambitious new approach to re-imagining how we design our products and solutions … Quite simply, our goal — on a scale unmatched… Read more »