Reading time: 3 mins 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…
Reading time: < 1 min Every company is unique. Every company has their own processes, their own documents and, of course, their own language. That language is part of the culture and if you don’t embrace the new language it’s likely that there will always be friction and, worse, misunderstanding in the future. Take, for example, the process documents you…
Reading time: < 1 min We are nearing the end of a release cycle and will soon be starting the next set of workstreams and, excitingly, we’ve managed to push the involvement of the technical writers right up to the early design stages. What does this mean? Roughly speaking the process of creating the stories is one part of the…
Reading time: < 1 min Last week we held a shortened Kaizen-style event in which we discussed the requirements capture part of our product lifecycle. It was an interesting couple of days which yielded a new process that we think is an improvement on the previous one. That makes it sound very simple, it certainly wasn’t, but it was a…
Reading time: 2 mins Attending a conference is a mixed bag of experiences yet regardless of your knowledge in certain areas it is always a worthwhile to meet up with your peers and discuss the various common issues, gripes, moans and solutions that we all share. I was also lucky enough to bump into some ex-colleagues and to meet…
Reading time: 4 mins 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…