bookmark_borderWhen users don’t want help

For a while now I’ve been watching video presentations from the likes of the TED and GEL sessions. Largely these are delivered by people who are at the forefront of their field or who challenge common perceptions with some unique thinking.

The TED (Technology, Entertainment, Design) sessions can be a bit random but they are always entertaining as they are delivered by people with a real passion for what they do, to an accomodating audience, by experienced presenters. It’s a good combination.

The GEL (Good Experience Live) conference is, as the name suggests, focussed on good experience. Which begs the question “What is good experience?” but there are others far better versed in giving an answer to that question so I’ll leave them to it (you may find some answers on the conference website).

It was on the latter website that I recently watched a presentation by the head of OXO (Note for UK readers: this is an American housewares company, not the makers of gravy cubes). Alex Lee, President of OXO, delivered a presentation featuring some of their products and outlined some of the guiding principles they follow, one of which he stated as:

“Helping people without the stigma of being helped”

Sound familiar? Have you heard something similar when discussing why “no-one reads the documentation”?

I think the first person who I heard mention this was Matthew Ellison at one of the Digitext Help Conferences. It was early in my career and did strike me as quite fundamental and a little bit hard to fathom. As a Technical Writer my main goal is to make the life of the user better (to give them a good experience when using the software by aiding them through those process), so to hear that there was an issue like this that blocked someone from accessing the documentation I was so carefully crafting was quite a shock.

So how do we, as technical communicators, deal with this issue? How can we help our users get past that stigma?

I’m interested in hearing your thoughts on this, I have a couple of ideas in mind but nothing firm. Is this something you try and cater for in your product information? Do you have any way to influence this in other areas of the product? What techniques have you deployed that help get users ‘into’ the documentation? Is there much of anything that we CAN do??

I’m off to dig about for any research into this area, feel free to leave your thoughts and ideas in the comments, or email me direct.

bookmark_borderGot TED?

Have you heard of the TED conference? (TED stands for Technology, Entertainment, Design)

No? It’s been going a while now, and got started back in 1984

…out of the observation by Richard Saul Wurman of a powerful convergence between Technology, Entertainment and Design. The first TED included demos of the newly released Macintosh computer and Sony compact disc, while mathematician Benoit Mandelbrot demonstrated how to map coastlines with his newly discovered fractals and AI guru Marvin Minsky outlined his powerful new model of the mind.

As well as the conference they share some of the sessions on the internet (freely under Creative Commons license). The quality of these sessions remains high with some of the brightest minds of current times talking about some mind-blowing things and I remain constantly fascinated by the crossover of ideas from one distinct stream of thought to another.

Personally the TED sessions have prompted me to buy several books and dig deeper into some of the topics, I’ve learned a lot.

So, when Adrian McEwen said he’d pulled together a downloadable taster pack of some of the best bits, and was looking for a little help with some bandwidth, I figured it would be good to give something back. Included in the torrent file he’s put together (which will nicely fit on a DVD once you’ve downloaded it), are:

  1. Dan Gilbert asks “Why are we happy?”
  2. Malcolm Gladwell on spaghetti sauce
  3. Sir Ken Robinson say schools kill creativity
  4. Hans Rosling shows the best stats you’ve ever seen
  5. Barry Schwartz on the paradox of choice
  6. Gever Tulley on five dangerous things for kids

So, don’t just sit there, fire up your Torrent application of choice (I prefer uTorrent) and GRAB IT WHILE YOU CAN.