Newsletter of the Society for Technical Communication, San Francisco Chapter February/March 2008

January 2008 Meeting -- Overview of Trends, Tools, and Technologies in Software User Assistance
Presented by Joe Welinske and Reviewed by Sophie Jasson-Holt

Technical Communicators Long for the Big Picture

Software user assistance is any type of activity that helps users work with software. Are we armed with the right skills for assisting users? Are we too attached to one tool or too entrenched in one User Assistance (UA) project lifecycle or development methodology? Is our salary commensurate with our experience? Are we mired in reams of unfinished documentation without an effective way to prioritize our workloads? Are we developing content that is easy for end-users to find and contextually relevant?

Joe Welinske Paints a Picture

Joe Welinske, president of WritersUA and Seattle resident, delivered an ambitious presentation to a packed room of STC folks for the January chapter meeting. Joe answered some commonly asked questions posed by professional technical communicators.

Joe presented survey results recently completed by WritersUA. The stuff about skills, tools and technology trends was worthwhile. But Joe's challenge to the technical writing profession and the specific examples of technical communication opportunities really got me excited.

Survey Says "Good Writing Is In"

Writing is the most highly valued UA skill. Folks who are skilled at writing procedures, conducting interviews, and editing copy are well suited to UA. This is good news for technical communicators. If we haven't kept pace with the cacophony of open source technologies, the implementation of Darwin Information Typing Architecture (DITA) to our current business context, or the overwhelming suite of help authoring tools, we can take comfort. We can write.

A Word or Two about Tools and Technologies

With a sigh of relief, we can all bask in the good news. Good writing is still as critical, if not more important than ever before. But, the relevance of tools cannot be underestimated. Tools dictate what we do and how we work. See Figure 1 at the end of the article for summary view of tool trends. Tools can imprison and liberate. Technical communicators need to pay attention to Adobe UA authoring tools and the Windows help platform, which continue to own the biggest piece of the market.

As the tools and technologies evolve, it's important to envision a diverse world. and to adopt a technology agnostic mindset so that we, as technical communicators, can learn the tools we need for the task at hand.

Traditional Technical Writing is Broken

A bold statement but worth thinking about. Technical communicators must engage in self-reflection about the state of our profession in an atmosphere of information overload, of user-generated content, of globalization, of a crowded marketplace flooded with unique software products. As an example, many of us believe that all features for a product must be documented. If the application has a hundred features then we must write procedures for all hundred features. Does this approach address end-user pain points?

Let's Turn It on Its Head

Instead of a one-size-fits-all approach to documenting features, Joe invites us to shed the heavy workload. He suggests we ask ourselves the following:

•  What are our users top pain points?
  

Set priorities based on end-user pain points. Write well-crafted help topics for the top pain points and consider the remaining feature topics as edge cases. Wait for feedback from users before you add to your workload.

All words written must be edited, marked-up, tested, localized and managed. It's time to write only the high priority topics. Publish less, write better, and write less.

Ubiquitous Opportunities for Technical Communication Practitioners

Avoid myopia. Broaden your horizons. Technical communicators can apply writing skills to the scads of content, which proliferate under the rubric of Web 2.0. Here are few opportunities:

• Write conversational magazine style articles as a supplemental form of UA
• Extract, vet, edit and publish discussion group content that typically gets buried
• Transform popular and poorly written blogs into editorial columns as a form of UA
• Develop scripts for the Web and podcasts because many are un-viewable
• Develop search friendly content to improve findability of documentation sets
• Re-architect knowledge bases to prioritize and expose knowledge to users

A Final Note

Technological advances have created an environment of seemingly endless product choices, diverse content distribution mechanisms, and a variety of end-user technologies. End-users need assistance and technical tommunicators can help.

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