I’ve been reading Ginny Redish’s book, Letting Go of the Words: Writing Web Content That Works. It was a bit slow at first because the early material is pretty basic. And I came into it with the preconception that it wouldn’t apply much to documentation, since we write help systems and manuals.

In light of our team’s search for the tool that best meets a set of specific requirements, I’ve decided that Redish’s book has everything to do with what I do—or what I should be doing.

My Beef with Tri-pane Help

If you’ve been reading this blog for a while, it’s no secret to you that I’m not a big fan of tri-pane help. I think it’s dated and is associated in people’s minds with unhelpfulness.

But in our search for a tool that will give us a more robust Web output, I’ve discovered the main reason I don’t like tri-pane help.

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I’ve got some bad news if you’re a die-hard RoboHelper. No, Adobe isn’t shelving RoboHelp, nor are they reintroducing kadov tags.

I’m being switched to Flare.

Once you’ve come out of cardiac arrest, let me explain.

I’ve said before that I’m not married to any particular tool; I don’t carry around a sign or a mentality that says, “If you don’t use RoboHelp, go jump off a bridge!” The whole HAT wars thing is a bit tiresome. I don’t have any particular feeling toward Adobe, though I’ve heard their customer support leaves something to be desired. And MadCap’s idea of what qualifies as a separate software application bothers me. But they haven’t committed some personal offense against me. (Though back when I evaluated Flare v1 and received a call from MadCap, the person sounded a little offended that I declined to purchase it.)

So since I don’t have some conflict of interest, it comes down to the tools themselves—and what our team is doing. We just hired two new User Education team members, and one is Flare MVP Paul Pehrson, AKA DocGuy. He sits next to me, and in a discussion about Flare that he and another colleague had the other day, let me tell you that the dude knows what he’s talking about. He told me he hasn’t used RoboHelp. The other new guy has used both and prefers Flare. And Tom Johnson is already using it.

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Currently, two main things bother me with my approach to help, and I’m looking for a way to solve these problems.

Problem 1: I Can’t Update Help on the Fly

Like the application code that I document, my materials are checked by the testing team. I don’t have any problem at all with that; in fact, I think it’s a benefit to my deliverables. Some sharp-eyed testers have caught errors, and because they’re also testing the system, they can verify that my descriptions of the system are accurate.

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