bookmark_borderAuthor-it Web Help Configuration Wizard

For version 5.3, Author-it released new web help templates and having played with them a bit I have to say I like them. However I was struggling to see how to enable some of the options that you can see in the example Author-it provide, so off into the HTML and CSS files I headed to see if I could see anything useful in there.

And there is, several of the options are commented out in the HTML code and with a little bit of poking and prodding I got some of them to work. Pretty straightforward, if you know HTML and CSS that is.

But what if you don’t?

Well the good news is that the ever productive Hamish Blunck has created an Author-it Web Help Configuration Wizard which, in a few simple steps, will produce you a custom Web Help template. It really is very simple and works like a charm, it also uncovered a few options I hadn’t spotted in the code.

Thanks to Hamish for providing this to the Author-it community (he also hosts a search engine that polls the old Yahoo Group). Great stuff this, go and give it a shot.

bookmark_borderManchester bound

All of a sudden, from being weeks, nay months!, away my trip to Manchester to see Elbow finish out their live performances of The Seldom Seen Kid is almost upon me. Friday I travel down to sunny Manc land, go for a wander (must remember my camera), head to the gig, and then back to the hotel. Another wander before jumping on the train back to Glasgow.

I’m getting quite excited about the thought. I’ve only been in Manchester once, many many years ago for a family wedding and even then it was on the outskirts. No idea what I’m gonna do whilst I’m there but I’m sure I’ll manage to fill the time.

And, of course, the Elbow gig that evening which should be, as it usually is, a belter. I’m hoping as it is in their home town that there will be a lower number of tossers there but I’m not holding out much hope to be honest (seriously, why pay all that money to stand and have a conversation with your mates? The man HAS THE VOICE OF AN ANGEL, so shut up and LISTEN, already!).

I’m also quite looking forward to catching the support act, the Fiery Furnaces. I’ve given their album another listen and think it could transfer quite well to a live setting but time will tell.

Regardless, I know I’ll fill up listening to “… Tower Crane Driver” because it’s such a wonderfully sad ballad, I’ll have a lump in my throat during Station Approach for reasons I don’t fully understand (it’s the line “coming home I feel like I, designed these buildings I walk by”) and when Mirrorball starts I’ll likely close my eyes and bathe in the sumptuous melody and smile with each line of the song.

Yup, it’s fair to say I can’t wait.

Is it Friday yet??

bookmark_borderISTC West of Scotland Group

The ISTC West of Scotland area group will meet on Thursday 22nd October from 7.30 p.m. onwards at the Waxy O’Connors pub, 44 West George Street, Glasgow, G2 1DH. Please make your way to McTurk’s Room on the middle level.

The evening will start with a discussion of “Conferences and how we benefit from them”, followed by an opportunity to network and chat with your peers (and hey, the bar will be open too!).

You don’t need to be an ISTC member to attend, and the more the merrier. Mine’s a Guinness!

Thanks to Katja McLaughlin for organising this. See you there.

bookmark_borderStrange season

Walking through Glasgow yesterday, my eye was drawn to a few window boxes. Dashes of scarlet red and vibrant yellow were glowing in the early morning sun, people were walking about in short sleeves, sunglasses hiding their eyes.

As I walked on, a burnt orange leaf helter skeltered towards the ground then, as the chilled breeze picked up, more and more leaves fell to the ground. So summer is over, and autumn is already knocking on the door.

But, is it just me or do the seasons seem to be overlapping more and more?

Flowers are still in bloom whilst the trees take on their autumn rust.

The only reason I ask is that autumn is my favourite season, especially these days as we no longer really get a summer, so I’m always on the lookout for that change in the seasons.

Which means this weird merging of the seasons is really throwing me out of whack. Is it still summer? Or is it autumn? How do I know?

bookmark_borderPlease don't lie

This post is prompted entirely by my recent interactions with Royal Mail, but the hold true for many organisations.

Life, as we all know, has times when it just seems to be ganging up on you. Nothing seems to go right, nothing happens the way you expect and you are left in an uncomfortable place and without enough, or some times any, knowledge or information you quickly become frustrated as you are not sure what to do next.

So when, as a customer, I reach that place the last thing I want to hear are lies. They may be lies offered in good faith, but they are blatant and completely without excuse.

The most common lie I’ve heard is the lie of affirmation. Being told that I matter, or that the organisation is very keen to improve their service and help solve my problem, and other such positive affirmation is not useful and likely to only irk me further.

Apologise by all means but please mean it, and please make sure it is immediately followed up with an offer of help.

And when you have really stuffed up and I, the customer, point this out, have the good grace to agree, rather than look for excuses that I, the customer, have no control over. I’m sure that crucial system was down for a short while and that is the root of all evil in the world, but hey, it’s not my problem.

Lastly, and this is sometimes the worst of all, please please PLEASE do not send me out a questionnaire after the event. Remember, I’ve been angry and frustrated, lost in the midst of YOUR processes and systems and most likely I’ve been the one trying to peace together information from email A, website B and phonecalls C, D and E as, for no good reason (trust me, my company builds this stuff, there is no reason why you can’t have all your systems talking to each other).

That questionnaire is usually a stock affair with a nice welcoming “ohhh we are good people and not only that we are trying to be better!” waffle at the start, and is constructed in such a way as to make REAL feedback almost impossible.

People like me really don’t want to write letters of complaint, and you know what, when things go bad that’s ok. Just don’t lie to us. Tells us you know something has gone wrong, share the information with us, talk to us and be human. We don’t expect everything to work all the time, but the way you handle things when they go wrong makes far more of a difference than you seem to realise.

bookmark_borderMeasurements and Metrics

It’s funny how these things come together sometimes, when two separate discussions, one here in the office and the other in the Author-it Forums, nicely lead me to a conclusion on something I’ve been pondering recently. How to measure what we produce?

The first discussion was with a new guy in our team, who was voicing concerns about the amount of information he was producing. He stated that, when describing some of the concepts our product uses, he would spend a lot of time figuring them out, talking to people about them and understanding them, but that usually translated into “not a lot being produced”.

I pointed out that, as far as I’m concerned, the more concise and effective the information, the better. Some things do require a lot of content, others don’t. There are additional benefits when you consider the single source aspect as well, it’s much easier to re-use a tightly focussed topic than one which tries to cover too much information.

The second discussion, in the Author-it forums, was someone asking if there was a way to track the number of words each writer was producing, apparently as a way to track productivity.

Don’t worry, plenty of people pointed out the fallacy of that line of thinking; it’s very easy to pad out a document or topic with additional words even though they might not add any value and may lead to ambiguity.

However I’m not really thinking along the lines of productivity, nor measuring the individual, I’m more concerned with measuring what we produce.

But how?

The obvious answer is to engage with our audience and get their feedback about the documentation. There are various ways of doing this, and depending on your audience some might not be available.

Arranging time to sit down with the people who use the product, and your documentation, is best and can be run as a product focussed session. If your company runs customer forums or workshops then it should be easy enough to schedule time into the agenda (your company understands how important documentation is, right?), but even if you can’t get direct access you could try a questionnaire, allowing customers to ‘score’ the documentation.

Ultimately you need to get feedback from the people who use your documentation, find out whether they can find the information they need, once they’ve found it do they understand it, is it clear, accurate, unambiguous? It’s not easy to quantify what we do at every level but using a questionnaire which includes an indication of a score can give you a way to start further discussions. The score itself isn’t the important bit, it’s what you do with the feedback that matters.

I’d love to hear if you’ve tried other ways of measuring your documentation, and I’m not alone. In the current economic climate there is more pressure to justify what we do, so making sure we have some good weapons up our sleeves will benefit us all.