In our ongoing department reorganization, we technical writers are experiencing some angst as we carve out a desirable place for ourselves. However, as we’ve talked about it as a community of practice (no longer as an organized team with our own manager), I think we’re coming to an agreement that now is the time to make things happen—to strike, as Tom likes to say.

After the initial, high-level reorganization, Tom and I are in the same division, so we’ve discussed a plan for taking a more prominent place in project managers’ and interaction designers’ consciousness. This is the key for us because the PMs are the ones to include us in their project plans and budgets, and we would be working with designers to decide on user education approaches and contribute to the design itself.

Finding Tech Comm’s Place in the Family

After Tom’s blog post about our meeting with an interaction design manager, I asked him about his point of view and his readers’ reactions to the post. We discussed getting involved in projects early and contributing to user interface text. We talked more about this in our community meeting this week. Again, we’re looking to make sure that the people who make the decisions give us a rightful place at the table.

We also talked about many designers’ “holy grail” of creating products so intuitive that no documentation is needed. Tom reminded me and then the group of an important point I had forgotten. An interaction designer once said something like this to me, and I had passed it on to the team: “Saying that ‘if the interaction designer does his job right, the product doesn’t need help’ is like saying ‘if the developer does his job right, the product doesn’t need QA.’”

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I’ve expressed dissatisfaction in the past with the traditional tri-pane help format. I think it’s outdated and has gotten such a bad reputation with computer users that it’s too late to change that. So I think it’s time to find other ways to provide user assistance.

A few weeks ago, I got an email stating I was now being followed on Twitter by @helpburner. I thought this could be another technical writer, and I usually check the tweets of people who follow me anyway. Imagine my interest when Mike Stokes, the owner of this account, had tweets mentioning the beta test of a product called HelpBurner.

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For the two years between the time I got married and I graduated from Utah State University, my wife and I lived in a 400-square-foot apartment that we fondly refer to as “The Shoebox.”

Every so often, we’d get in the mood to rearrange the furniture. You wouldn’t think that 400 square feet gave us many options, but we managed it. The funniest part is that we’d both get in the mood to rearrange things on the same night—at about 11:00.

So I have the urge to rearrange things occasionally and to try something new. This is one of those times. In about a week, I’ll have been blogging for two years. Last year on my first anniversary of blogging, I started Gryphon Mountain Tales, “the more mythological side of the Mountain.” This year, I’ve redesigned my site visually. (If you attended my STC webinar on February 10, you got a bit of a preview in the designs of my slides.)

Wanting a change of scenery isn’t the only reason I’ve done this. A better reason is that I think the original design didn’t really fit me anymore; it didn’t fit what I’m trying to convey about myself. The new design, with its header image, tells more about me than the last one did. I’ve got a professional side, but I don’t mind acting like a cartoon character sometimes.

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My first step into Web design was really very primitive and laughable. I was in the Honors version of 2010 English at Utah State University. The 1010 class was your basic writing composition class, and 2010 was the next step up. Both were required as general classes, but I had obtained the equivalent credits in high school. But for the Honors program, I had to take the 2010 English class.

The instructor added a Web dimension to the regular writing assignments by having us design webpages for our essays and other pieces. This was back in the day when the default background color in Web browsers was medium gray. The first page I did had a medium gray background and was done I believe in FrontPage (does that exist anymore?). It was pretty sad by today’s standards. The others I did for that class weren’t much nicer.

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The main stakeholder for one of my projects has asked for a procedural user guide for certain tasks in the application performed by particular user roles. It will be comparable to a manual I did for another application for the same stakeholder; that one was organized first by role and then by task. The business process was heavily intertwined with some of the software procedures in that manual. This next one may be the same way, though it won’t be as substantial a project because not nearly as many tasks will be included.

In that previous manual, I had a side column for note boxes, but the rest of the information was contained in the main column. Many different kinds of information were mixed in that main flow of content, with only some being set off by some style or another. I think that’s a bit problematic. Users wouldn’t be able to tell readily which type of information they happened to be looking at all the time.

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While filing my income tax return online, I noticed that the primary way the website offered user assistance was through questions worded in first person. Each screen provided four to six questions that had to do with that particular screen. This caught my attention partly because I had just been thinking about empathetic user assistance. When I clicked a question, the corresponding information opened in a small pop-up window in the center of my screen.

I’ve wondered how different my job would be if we offered user assistance this way. I like to design some of the user interaction myself, whereas in projects like this tax site I used, it seems like the Web designer took care of that part, and all the technical writer (assuming there was one) did was supply questions and answers to be plugged in.

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I’ve noticed that lately, I’ve been choosing something other than bold formatting for high-level headings. Sans-serif typefaces like Arial and Verdana are commonly used as headings, and when they get beyond about 14 points, they start looking a little too heavy.

The fact that the heading is in a larger font and is surrounded by white space sets it apart from body text, so bolding can be unnecessary anyway. Instead of bolding, I sometimes like to set headings apart using some additional visual cue like color (which may or may not help, depending on whether you have users that are colorblind) or a graphical indicator. An icon, vertical lines, background shading, or gradients can be part of a heading style and readily suggest to the reader that something is different about that text.

I’ve started to favor these alternatives, and I think they have added to the visual interest of the overall documents.