Technical Communication
-
Usability Matters
Anyone working in the software industry will know the term “usability” and have a reasonable idea of what it entails. As a technical writer, a user advocate within the development team, there is typically an overlap between how we think, and how usability specialists think. For starters, anyone who is delivering information should know who…
-
Consideration Layer Model
As a technical writer, every decision you make is influenced by several discrete things, considerations for either the audience of the information, the process you’ll need to follow to collate and verify the information, and so on. Every decision requires such considerations but is it possible to model these? Some background first; I don’t revisit…
-
Promoting DITA without promoting DITA
Recently Scott Abel posted a heartfelt plea to get people all psyched up about how to better promote DITA to the rest of the world. He backs the idea of the DITA Adoption Technical Committee, stating that: “we need excellent communicators with the gumption, know-how, and network to get the word out about the many…
-
DITA Maturity Model
I mentioned this in passing last week but having had a little time to delve into the model in a little more depth I thought it was worth re-visiting. The DITA Maturity Model as an organic model that is still being developed. Rather smartly it’s presented in Wiki format allowing anyone who is interested to…
-
Move over Adobe
As we are in the midst of rethinking our publishing processes, I’ve been looking at the current crop of tools, and (for our needs) three of them stand out over their competitors. Adobe, AuthorIT and MadCap seem to be heading for a battle royale, with the latter two the David to Adobe’s Goliath. But who…
-
Back to DITA?
I’ve mentioned DITA a few times on this blog, and my DITA is not the answer post is still attracting attention. As I’ve said, I think the DITA standard is an excellent one for software documentation and the DITA movement is slowly catching up to the hype. I’ve never given up on DITA and had…