Last year, I was working with a producer in our organization’s motion picture studio to create a training video. He has done some work in Hollywood and knew Kirk Douglas. I griped that Hollywood doesn’t get the picture when people pay to see certain kinds of movies and they don’t make more of those kinds—they continue to run garbage out of the mill though most of it doesn’t make much money.

This producer told me that they don’t make movies for us; they make movies for each other.

Now switch your brain over to your technical communication. Are we like that? I have joked myself that I get paid to write stuff that no one reads. However, probably because of my profession, I’m more likely to use the quick-start guides or check the help system while using something. Documentation is there in my consciousness.

If there are people out there like me, are we in fact creating documentation for other technical communicators to read? Are we writing mostly for each other, and if someone outside our field happens to use the help, so much the better?

It’s a scary world I’m depicting here—the sort where the sky is red, the vegetation is withering away, buildings are crumbling, and the soil is black and crusted. Or is it that far out? How do you get the masses to access your content? How do you make it easy and enticing? There are all kinds of rules out there about making your content usable, but what about getting attention?

Unfortunately, I think there’s something that has settled in the atmosphere and worked its way into our food—you know, getting rained into the earth, soaked up by plants, and in turn eaten by beasts and us—that has propogated the attitude that help isn’t helpful. Some of the blame is ours (see my previous post).

How do we change prevailing attitudes? How do we gain users’ trust? All the usable help in the world does no one any good if we don’t get people interested in looking for the answers where we’ve provided them. How do we get them to click that “Help” link or look at that quick-reference card? I’m interested in your ideas.