Technical Communication
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Does single sourcing content work?
One of the more popular posts on this blog is titled DITA is not the answer and, whilst things are certainly moving forward, it’s a little sad that it is still valid. A recent comment on that post suggested that it’s not just DITA that is lacking, it’s the working realities of single source that…
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Thoughts on HATT Survey thoughts
Tom Johnson has had a look at the survey recently published by the HATT matrix website on help authoring and, by pulling in the results of some other surveys in the same area, has extrapolated some good conclusions from them. He rightly points out that surveys need to be taken with a pinch of salt…
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UA Conference Notes – Day 2
Notes and thoughts from Day 2 of the User Assistance Conference Session 1 – Juliette Fleming – XML Tagging and Search Facets An early start for an interesting session in which Juliette outlined how Oracle have introduced search Facets to their online help system. Essentially a facet is a tagged chunk of information or help…
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UA Conference Notes – Day 1
Notes and thoughts from Day 1 of the User Assistance Conference Session 1 – Tony Self – Emerging Help Delivery Technologies It’s been quite a while since I heard Tony speak but as ever he provided an entertaining, if somewhat limited, presentation. Covering the various types of help viewing technologies he nicely summarised some of…
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Driving Development
Recently Daniel Brolund posted an idea around something he termed User Guide Driven Development, it’s an interesting read and, you know what, he’s almost right. Almost. First up you should note that Daniel works for the company that created the application he name drops in his post, Bumblebee. However his approach did ring a few…
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Testing Documentation
As part of the product, testing documentation seems like an obvious thing to do, but what does it really mean? I’ve fielded the question in a few different places now and it’s always interesting to delve deeper and understand the rationale behind the request. “We should test the documentation”, seems like a harmless enough statement…