Tag: Recently Read

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Blimey, another week has flown past and, as ever a few things have caught my eye.

9 ways to gather user feedback
It’s often a struggle to get true user feedback on your documentation, Craig Haiss offers some suggestions to improve things in this area. Whilst I’ve tried some of these, and had heard of them all, it’s worth a look to jog the memory:

You can write the most detailed instructions in the world, but if they aren’t the instructions users actually want, you’re wasting your time. That said, how do you go about gathering feedback to flesh out your documentation?

Tech Comm Job to Job Title: Something Lost in Transit?
Ben Minson is musing on job titles and, as well as raising a giggle, ends up stuck. Job titles, as a way to convey what you do for a living, are important.

… the dictionary says one who documents is a “documentalist”—however, I’m reluctant to adopt a job title that includes the word “mental.” So this is where you get “documentation specialist.” The same goes for “usability specialist.”

It seems a little funny that, being writers at heart and therefore professional manipulators of language, some of the terms we pick for our field don’t easily translate into job titles.

I’m currently experimenting with the title “Technical Information Manager” which is a little OTT but seems to fit my current role, thankfully my company, like myself, isn’t hung up on formal job titles (they prefer that you, you know, get on with whatever needs done). So, what’s your job title?

Typography humour

Glossary of DITA terms
Bob Doyle is wondering if there should be a central, user-maintained, glossary of DITA terminology:

many DITA-related terms are not defined … They are simply assumed.
And some is insider jargon, like reltable for Relationship Table.
And there is no convenient alphabetical listing.
You can search for terms on the DITA Infocenter, but then you have to already know the term.

This got me thinking. If you have been toying with setting up a documentation Wiki, then this may be an excellent place to start. It might also throw up some interesting usage of terminology. Definitely something I’m going to have a stab at (well, I’ll add it to the list of things to try).

RoboHelp vs Flare
Interesting round up of posts and comments on this topic. If you use, or are planning to use, either product, give it a look.

And I’m done. Another week in the wonderful world of Technical Communications has gone, I wonder what next week will bring?

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Text Preferences Survey
What is the ideal text size to use on the web? What about line height and column (line) length? Most of the information in this area is based on print (at best) or anecdotal (at worst). A design agency in Brighton, Message, has decided to try and find out by carrying out a survey:

“Our goal is to publish a report that provides hard facts about what constitutes ‘readable’ text on the web … We see this report being of value not just to our clients and their customers but to web users at large.”

It only takes a few minutes to complete so go and take the survey.

Why software applications need product blogs and why they don’t get them
As well as having a very long title, Tom also hits on some points well worth considering if you are at all web savvy (and I’m presuming that, as you are reading this blog, you are). Most of his ideas are spot on but would require a lot of business process change, but I think they are worth picking up on:

I can think of six major ways product blogs can benefit users and project teams. Product blogs can …
– Provide a venue for product announcements
– Allow users to submit product bugs
– Allow users to submit feature requests
– Provide a roadmap preview for the product
– Enable a point of connection between users and project teams
– Provide a way to teach advanced tips to users

He also mentions something that I too have pondered, namely including RSS feeds in online help and somehow merging the two in a more dynamic way than before. Probably not much point in purusing that now but who knows what may happen in the future.

How to work better
A short list of simple, but powerful, advice which is applicable to everyone. Go on, there is at least one thing on that list that you could do better (or if you are like me, 3 or 4).

Subversion for writers
Entirely focussed on Mac OSX users, this has reminded me that we use Subversion at work and that I should really write up our process. Regardless of platform, the basic benefits of using a version control system can be realised with little cost.

What does it do? It manages multiple versions of a project in development. You check your project out of the repository, make changes and you commit those changes back to the repository. At any time you can view older versions of the whole project or of individual files, and revert to them, if the work done since was in error. You can make branches, which allows you to develop your work in two (or more) ways in parallel, and you can tag your project to say, at this point I met a certain milestone (eg: first draft, second draft, version sent to publisher X, version sent to publisher Y, published version, etc.)

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Another week has zoomed past, and I’m only now catching up! I’ve been helping out with our development group retrospectives… but more on that later. For now, here are a few things that caught my eye this past week.

Gatekeeper vs. team member
Whilst not directly talking about technical writing, there are some good points in this post, with several mirrors between some of our [sic] processes and that of the self-publishing author:

…some authors, trusting no one but themselves, will put out what they have to say, untouched by any other person. Sometimes this works. Usually it doesn’t. Others will reject the criticism of experts but accept the flattery of a subsidy publisher. Others will embrace the traditional publishing process and accept the input of those who have more publishing experience than they. Others fall along the full spectrum in between.

Is single source always the best option?
Single source, rightly, gets a lot of press and for a lot of companies would be of benefit. However it can be hard to convince others of those, here’s an example:

I know a single source of content will save me a lot of work. But for other people in the company it won’t. It will mean more work for them, not to mention a very steep learning curve, an investment in software and a strong training committment. It will save me lots of time and effort—in the long run—but it’s going to double the work effort of ten other people. Where is the benefit?

The last business case I pulled together this was the sticking point as well. Understanding the pain points, and how much they cost the company is key and the benefits need to be realised over a longer time period than you’d think.

Are you part of the industry conversation?
Anne Gentle (via Twitter) pointed out that Sun now have a formal blogging policy in place for their employees. It’s a great step and shows that they understand the role that blogging can play:

… By speaking directly to the world, without benefit of management approval, we are accepting higher risks in the interest of higher rewards. … The real goal isn’t to get everyone at Sun blogging, it’s to become part of the industry conversation.

Confluence Wiki adds page ordering
I’ve talked about Wikis before, and largely I think the core value comes through long-scale collaboration and, as such, haven’t really considered moving our documentation set to a wiki. There are very good cases for wiki-fying your documentation set of course, but for me there are one too many limitations. This news from Confluence is starting to change that as summed up by Sarah:

When you’re writing a documentation set, the sequence of the pages and chapters is very meaningful. It’s nice… well, many would argue that it’s essential to be able to define a logical page order rather than being stuck with an alphabetical order. Up to now in Confluence, we’ve worked around the problem by manually adding chapter numbers and page numbers, like “1. Introduction”, “2. Installation Guide”, “2.1 System Requirements”, and so on. Now take a look at point 2 in the Confluence 2.8 Release Notes. We can just drag and drop the pages and chapters where we want them. They stay there 🙂 and the new order is reflected in the PDF outputs and hierarchical page-tree views

Thinking like a user
I spend a fair amount of time reminding developers that they have a different mental model from (some of) our user base and that the design may be improved by taking the point of view of the target user. However I should confess that I fall into the very same trap myself:

the problem with being able to think like a user is that familiarity breeds … well, familiarity .. we’re using (at least I hope we are) the applications that we document daily … building a store of information about the application [and] we can easily lose sight of what the new user, who comes to the application tabula rasa, may experience.

Yup. Guilty!

Word 2003 Tip: Edit in Print Preview mode
I didn’t know this one either. You truly do learn something new everyday.

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Ahhh, the end of another week (well it will be in a few hours, just a few last diagrams to be rebranded…), which means it’s time for a quick roundup.

Pilcrow & Capitulum
A nice little post for the font freaks (guilty!) discussing the evolution of the that little symbol that is often used to mark the end of a paragraph.

It’s tempting to recognize the symbol as a “P for paragraph,” though the resemblance is incidental: in its original form, the mark was an open C crossed by a vertical line or two, a scribal abbreviation for capitulum, the Latin word for “chapter.”

Open Applications – A Model for Technical Documentation?
Ferdinand Soethe takes a look at the Open Source movement and finds several parallels and arguments for basing a technical documentation effort on the same principles. It’s not all a perfect match but this confirms some of my own suspicions.

Talking with Technical Editors on the topic of Single Source Publishing (SSP), one sometimes gets the impression of talking about Utopia. (Nearly) everyone knows it, nearly everyone could well use it in their work, but hardly anyone actually uses it.

The necessity to prepare contents for different target media can neither be really met with classic text processing or DTP systems nor with Web design tools. This was why the XML language family born in the 90’s found huge acceptance in the area of Technical Documentation.

Rethinking Community Documentation
An old but still valid and fascinating article exploring the changing landscape of technical information:

The way we educate ourselves to use and program computers is shifting along many of the same historic lines as journalism, scientific publication, and other information-rich fields.

As an industry much has changed in the two years since Andy wrote this article but it’s still worth a read, particularly if you are looking at launching your own technical community initiative.

Three Ways to Get Developers to Keep You up to Speed
A simple reminder of how to get things done, the kind of advice that sometimes seems very obvious until you read it and realise you aren’t doing it! I’m tempted to print out the three “rules” and pin them to the wall.

Get support from those whose voices everyone takes seriously. Chances are, you were hired because someone thought documentation is important. You may find yourself in an environment where you have to prove your importance, and many times that is a battle fought for a matter of inches rather than miles.

As ever, I’m keen to hear about any other technical writing/communications focussed blogs, in any area. If you write about your job, regardless of your industry, do let me know.

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Been a while since I did one of these and, as ever, they reflect some of the things that have caught my eye over the past week or so. A couple of things on DITA which have me rethinking my approach towards it, and a some links to posts discussing … welll community, social media, Web 2.0 kind of stuff, some of it is a little away from my world but it’s good to get a different point of view on these things.

Docbook versus DITA
Not the first comparison I’ve seen but an excellent summary comparison of DocBook versus DITA. Whilst it was written by someone who admits that they were looking to portray a favourable outcome for DocBook, it’s an well-balanced set of information and will be useful to many.

From Free to Three ($100K)
One of the issues I have with DITA is the cost associated with implementing a complete end to end solution, something that, apparently, I’ve been mistaken about:

Our DITA Tools from A to Z section on the DITA Users website lists every software and service up to those $300,000 publishing solutions. But our policy of free member access to online tools means that anyone anywhere in the world can at least get started (our membership fees range from free to $100 a year).

We call our approach “DITA from A to B,” authoring to building and, of course, publishing structured content.

Definitely something I’ll be checking out.

Agile Content Development

Social media represents such a fantastic opportunity because it allows us to create and launch media properties directly to the public. But even more of a blessing is the direct and indirect feedback process that naturally happens in this space.

You put something out there, and the crowd will reveal the direction you should go. It’s not necessarily always the wisdom of the crowd, but rather the desires and objections of the crowd that guide you.

Use of social media needs fear

What about all of the fears of potential liabilities, losing control, and (the night terror) negative comments? IRRELEVANT! All are either uncontrollable (and were all along) or can be mitigated with good policies, procedures and education. Social media carries as much risk as email. You should be more afraid of losing the battle for relevance.

Is IT in danger of becoming extinct?
I’m not entirely convinced but, once again, this post suggests that there is a shift of balance, and that shift is entirely driven by users and their new found abilities to build communities around, or away from, your products.

Social media empowers users at the expense of IT. Enterprise 2.0 companies marginalize IT by putting powerful tools directly into the hands of non-technical workers, bypassing IT in the process.

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Having been ill for a couple of weeks I’m just catching up with my reading list and there have been some fascinating posts and articles to read. Quite a few of them struck a chord and I’ll need to give them some more thought before I tackle them myself but all in all it’s a pleasure to be able to read such insightful posts from some very smart people. Ain’t blogs wonderful.

The agile technical writer
An excellent write up of the typical processes followed by a technical writing team in an Agile environment. It’s good to read this kind of thing, as it matches roughly what we do so… we must be doing it right?

In a similar vein I’ve recently written up an article for the ISTC Communicator magazine which outlines what I consider an average day in my working life. Naturally there is no such thing but the things I do, and the processes I follow match Sarah’s.

Interesting quote from Matt Haughey

My ideal blog engine company would hire some seasoned blogger and technical writer to be a documentation czar, keeping docs up to date when new versions are launched, produce screencasts for introductory users, and provide complete documentation at a stable URL that applies to every version of the product.

Moving legacy documentation to DITA
Scott pointed out this interview with Joann Hackos and, as ever, she offers sensible advice, particularly as I’m in the midst of planning such a move (to AuthorIT, not DITA):

Among your previously existing information, some of it we may call legacy because it documents products that are not changing much. Much of this information isn’t worth changing. There’s low value in converting or updating it.

The History of Visual Communication

Visual communication is the communication of ideas through the visual display of information. Primarily associated with two dimensional images, it includes: art, signs, photography, typography, drawing fundamentals, colour and electronic resources.

I’ve not read more than a couple of pages but this is fascinating and worth a look if you are at all interested in information design of any type.

Developing documentation, the FLOSS way.
Found on the DMN blog, this looks at the creation processes for documenting Open Source Software:

The common challenge is to create useful FLOSS documentation in a timely manner. The documentation must be continually updated as the software and projects evolve. It must be simple to understand yet comprehensive. The documentation must be easily translated into dozens of languages. It must be easily revised and distributed in a variety of display and publishing formats (HTML, PDF, PostScript, etc.).

Some handy tips and thinking points for anyone looking to streamline (and speed up) their content creation processes.

Writing in times of resource constraints
Mike Hughes offers some sage advice with some business perspective applied to the resourcing issue many of us face:

If your resources are tight, ask yourself whether you are writing the essential stuff at a level of quality users will notice

“Good enough” documentation is a reality that many of us don’t like to admit, but there are good reasons to understand when it is applicable to use that benchmark.