I told someone yesterday that there was one piece of technology that was so intuitive it didn’t need an instruction manual. I was talking about the traditional fixed wire telephone. It turns out I was wrong. A quick search on YouTube revealed there was a major education campaign in the 1920s and 30s, instructing the… Read more »
Tag: user assistance
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 »
What should you include in your user documentation?
Technical authors are faced with limited time and resources, so they often are faced with the dilemma as to what to include and what to leave out of their user documentation. You may ask, if 80% read only 20% of the content, is there any value in documenting the rest? Technical Authors are often great… Read more »
“The worst Help system I have ever seen”
Sarah Maddox reported from the WritersUA conference that Microsoft’s April Reagan gave a frank presentation on the planning and design that has gone into version 3 of Microsoft Help. She was quoted as saying the feedback on the Help 2 (used in Windows Vista) was poor. For example, “This is the worst help system I have ever seen”. At a previous… Read more »