First, I’ve devoted a lot of my attention in 2011 to fiction. I’m most of the way through my second draft of a novel. During my two-week Christmas vacation a year ago, I wrote over 27,000 words of the first draft. This last vacation, I edited and revised my way through almost the entire second half of it in my second-draft effort. I’m trying to perfect my storytelling skills. Once I complete the second draft, I’ll be reading through it in as few days as possible, just making notes as I go as to what needs fixing. Then I’ll go back and make changes accordingly.

Those who have followed the Gryphon Mountain Tales may think this strange, seeing as I haven’t posted a new tale in months. I did promise an experiment, and the experiment proved that I’m not good at serial fiction. I don’t do well when I have defined only a vague overarching storyline. I’m not saying that the Tales have died; they’ve just taken a big break.

Focusing on a novel, not to mention trying to spend time with my daughter, has left much less time for blogging here than I’ve had before.

Second, I haven’t had as much to say about tech comm this year, or at least during the last several months. As I said, I think this is related to the first cause. My mind hasn’t been on tech comm as much as before, so I haven’t had as many ideas for blog posts.

I used to have this “blog lens” through which I would view much of my professional experience. Multiple times throughout the week, I would think, “That topic would make a good blog post,” and I’d make a note. However, in much of 2011, my subconscious has been working out kinks in my novel instead.

With all of that said, however, I do have something to blog about today.

Part of the User Education team’s goals in 2011 was to have a team style guide finalized. I became the driver behind that effort. Mainly because of that, and probably because I’ve been doing a lot of writing and revising, the topic of concise writing has been on my mind.

A lot of the problem with common English usage these days is the padding. People insert words that don’t need to be there. Our wording isn’t precise. People feel like they have to add modifiers to their words to add importance or clarity when they don’t need to, resulting in redundancy and the weakening of the core idea.

Writers know that putting together a concise, clear message takes time. But I believe the first try would be closer to the mark—not to mention the final version—if we truly understand the language and use words precisely.

I’m sure you’d like an example. I’ll give you a couple.

“Return again.” What’s wrong with this phrase? Nothing, if it’s used correctly. Return means to come or go to a place you’ve been before. If you’re talking about returning the first time, the word already includes the idea of “being there again.” If you then leave a second time and come back, you are then in fact returning again. But most of the time, when I hear or read the phrase “return again,” the speaker or writer isn’t talking about a second time coming back, but rather the first.

“Each one.” This phrase is redundant. Merriam-Webster’s even shows one of the definitions of “each” to be “each one,” drawing on one of the other meanings of “each.” But when people say or write “each one,” they’re generally using “each” in the sense where it can stand alone meaning “each one,” making that “one” unnecessary.

I’m getting dizzy going in circles like this.

Anyway, my point with this example is that I don’t know if there’s ever a reason to say “each one” in speaking or writing. “Each” suffices.

These examples illustrate how easy and common it is in English, and perhaps other languages, to tack unneeded words on to other words.

To be precise in our writing, we should understand these nuances and then write, and edit, for them.

For technical communicators, precise language isn’t about persnickety grammarians with yardsticks ready to rap knuckles. Precise language means clear communication, less content for our audiences to sift through, and lower translation costs (where every word is an expense to the organization).

Precision is concision.

Note: If you find any unnecessary words in my post, let me know.

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This theme comes up time and again among our User Education team members. Yesterday, one of us gave a presentation to our community of practice about usable design, what makes something usable, and how tech writers can contribute. She suggested we come up with some metrics that help us demonstrate how our contribution to usable design increases user productivity and lowers cost.

As part of her illustration, she showed a chart about the more and more expensive it gets to fix a bug from the requirements stage through to the maintenance stage.

An idea came to mind, and I shared it with the team, that one of the things that we can use some hard numbers with is determining how many steps it takes to complete a task. The presenter had used an example to show how a process that she would have expected to take four steps instead took twelve. If we can analyze designs and determine how many steps it takes to complete associated tasks, we can tell the project team, “That’s going to be hard to explain. That process will take ten steps (or fourteen, or twenty). And when a user sees a procedure with that many steps, the first thought is ‘This is going to be hard,’ probably followed up with ‘I hope I do it right.’ Confidence goes into a nosedive.”

The second part of the idea is that to give ourselves more clout, we ought to get the project manager’s support at the beginning. We can explain how expensive it gets to fix usability problems later and how we can help catch those problems early on because we think in terms of “how do I do this?” By virtue of our job, we quickly learn how complicated a task is going to be. Once we get the manager’s buy-in, he or she can back us up if the team hedges when we point out that a design involves overly complicated steps.

Metrics are a tech writer holy grail. How do we show return on investment? How do we show that we reduce support costs that would otherwise outweigh the money our services cost—especially when we’re working on a new project that has no support history? In the case of usability, how do we numerically increase the usability of the product?

So procedure length is one way to quantify the usability of a feature or product. What other ways can we quantify our contribution to usability?

Image credit: Image: Master isolated images / FreeDigitalPhotos.net

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Over the last few months, the User Education Team has developed a content model and a supporting style guide. Our evaluation of various documentation authoring tools a few months ago resulted in our choosing Author-it—a tool none of us was familiar with.

In our discussions about our content model, or how our information is structured, sometimes we kept drifting into talking about what Author-it would allow us to do. It was an easy line to cross. The way you approach reuse and other considerations can change based on what tool you use.

But overall, the optimal way to structure information isn’t dependent on a tool. That’s probably why our team lead kept steering us away from thinking about whether aspects of our authoring approach and information architecture would be supported in Author-it. There were parts of our discussions that blurred the lines—we would sound like we were talking about the tool, but we really weren’t.

Such discussions highlight what I’ll refer to as the core component of technical communication.

That component is the heart of the term technical communication—that is, communication.

The secondary part of that term, technical, refers to the subject matter we are communicating about. But it could also refer to the method we choose to author, organize, and deliver the content, which these days rests in technology.

Technology changes. Communication channels and content delivery mechanisms change. We have Author-it today, but something more fitting for our organization and our needs may come along in a few years. DITA has spread through much of the tech comm space, but who’s to say something more effective won’t come along in the future, or that DITA won’t evolve (see what I did there) into something better?

Yes, the technology changes, but the core principles of communication don’t.

Varying definitions of communication exist. Some say that a message has to only be released from its source to be communication. Others say it has to be understood. I’m more in the second camp, and I would add that the message needs to be understood the way the originator intends. Otherwise, have you really gotten the message across? Has communication really occurred?

That’s why I’m not talking about “good communication.” It’s communication, period. Or it’s gobbledygook that doesn’t do the job.

I admit that the recipient of the message has to put at least a little effort into understanding the message. Those mental gears have to turn a notch. But communicators can make that effort as small as possible by doing what we do best: communicating.

What makes communication happen?

• Clarity. The message is free—or as free as possible—from interference caused by indirectness and jargon. It’s phrased in simple terms.
• Timeliness. The message comes when it’s appropriate. The recipient can make use of the information right then.
• Relatability. I could also call this “connectability.” The recipient can connect the information to what’s already in his head. He can relate it with his prior experience.

It doesn’t matter what tool you get excited about; in the end, it’s just that. A tool. It’s a means by which to get a job done. My audience probably doesn’t care about my tool. In the end, what they care about is the clarity, timeliness, and relatability of my message. They care about accomplishing their goals.

Image credit: renjith krishnan | FreeDigitalPhotos.net

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The objective for our style guide is to highlight the most important considerations so they’re together in the same place. That way, when we have a new member of our team or another contributor, it’s not a huge chore to review the team style guide and get up to speed.

It was with this in the back of my mind that I went to the Society for Technical Communication’s (STC) yearly conference a couple of weeks ago. I attended some sessions that had to do with writing for localization and for accessibility. In her presentation, “DUH: Diverse. Understandable. Human,” Char James-Tanny talked about inclusion being a better word than accessibility. Her presentation came close to what I had begun thinking about.

I was thinking that we often compartmentalize our writing. One person tells us we have to write to be accessible. Someone else says to write for easy translation. A third says to write for search-engine optimization. There are probably others.

Can’t we do all of them at the same time?

Of course, the answer is yes.

In attending these sessions and thinking further on it, I realized that a writer can meet these various needs through following certain guidelines and styles. I’m compiling a list that will inform the style guide, and I’m thinking about proposing a presentation at next year’s STC conference on the subject.

What are your thoughts? What other audiences or types of writing get compartmentalized like accessibility and easy localization do?

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Sometimes I get ideas about a problem I’m trying to solve once I’ve stopped actively thinking about it and have let it drift into the back of my mind. With Project Pinnacle, something escaped my attention until a few weeks after my visit to the pilot site.

Well, it didn’t entirely escape my notice, but its implications for documentation and training didn’t hit me immediately.

The thing I noticed while watching users try out my quick reference guides was that they tended to follow only the first few steps of the procedure. They would look at it long enough to get to the screen where they performed the task, and then they would try to do the rest without the guides.

One of the reasons for this is that they had to keep glancing between the monitor and the paper, which made it easy to lose their place. Trying to use a finger didn’t help much either because at some point they had to start typing.

A few weeks after my visit, I got an idea of maybe a true quick reference guide that would fit what they needed. Since they relied on the printed procedures only for navigation, why not just provide the navigation steps?

I put together a version of each guide that listed the steps with double angle brackets between each step. This condensed the existing material from about four pages for each guide down to under one page. I haven’t tried these versions out yet. The project manager wasn’t in favor of the version of the guides that have the screenshots with callouts because of the cost of keeping the screenshots current for all languages.

When I first reported to the project leadership about my visit to the pilot site, I pointed out that a way to improve our training of our audience and at the same time reduce documentation costs would be to provide more prompts in the application. I’m not trying to reduce my workload, but I believe that the more help you provide in the interface, the less help you have to maintain elsewhere. I know, not real profound, but it’s not something very many product designers think about.

Since then, I’ve provided prompts and descriptions for a number of application screens and features. We’ve seen a direct impact of this as we’ve worked on the training video scripts. We want to keep the verbal explanations simple and let the features be demonstrated so that we don’t have to rerecord the audio if features change. The fact that we’re including help in the interface helps us do this because we can leave much of the explanation to the application itself.

Image credit: Salvatore Vuono, freedigitalphotos.net

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The office staff tended to want to ask me how to do things and be walked through it, but I took those times to ask them to test out the instructions for me. However, on one occasion, I had to guide a brand-new user through a somewhat complicated scheduling procedure while she was on the phone with the person setting up the appointment. I figured it would be better to help her through that one because she’d feel enough pressure from trying to do it right and in a timely manner.

In addition to notes on improvements to make to the guides, I kept other notes. The rundown:

• 5 tasks to add to the guides
• 14 other changes needed to the guides
• 20 feature or change requests
• 10 bugs
• 14 miscellaneous items that were questions, observations, or usability problems

Changes I found I needed to make to the guides:

• Add sidebar for table of contents
• Add several tasks, some applicable across guides
• Change how I give an orientation to system navigation
• Add tips on effective searching
• Change heading styles to stand out more
• Make guide for each role visually different somehow
• Reference material for how different scheduling works for different types of activities

One problem I saw is that users would lose their places when going from a guide to the screen and back because they need both hands to type, so they couldn’t keep their place with a finger on the page. They’d go back to the guide and resume at a random step.

I asked my colleague Tom if he has any techniques for mitigating this problem. We talked about having a two-column layout for the guides with the text on one side and images on the other that have annotations or callouts that tie back to the instructions.

That sounded like a good idea and implementation of the quick reference concept. I had gone pretty minimalistic with the guides, having some orientation material on general application usage, and then the tasks with few images.

Today I tried restructuring one of the guides, and it turned out basically like the image here—instructions, a sidebar with ancillary information, and a screenshot. I have few actual callouts so far. At this point, I’ve mostly indicated only what part of the page each step applies to.

One benefit of this approach is that the steps are quick, and the image also illustrates the steps in a brief way. So a new person could use both, but a more experienced person could choose one or the other. The tricky part will be making it all lay out well and accommodate translations. It will be interesting to test out this approach if I get the chance.

A great result from having participated in the pilot is that the project manager invited me to a brainstorming meeting next week that I believe has to do with design decisions. The product manager called me earlier this week to talk about my visit to the pilot site, and he asked me to prepare any design suggestions regarding the usability problems I saw. It makes the project more interesting for me to participate and contribute beyond just writing end user instructions.

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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.

Tri-pane help appears to have been invented as a way to provide booklike documentation—that is to say, linear documentation. The table of contents, index, glossary are all carry-overs from when all documentation was in hard-copy manuals. While a book’s material isn’t necessarily linear, it still reflects linear thinking.

The Web Offers More

Ginny Redish’s book argues that because the Web is a different medium and holds different possibilities, we shouldn’t hold ourselves to organizing Web content in the same way we organize book content.

Tri-pane help is a pseudo-website; it has a header or toolbar of some kind and a left pane for left-hand navigation. Help authoring tools make it easy to assemble tables of contents, indexes, and glossaries, but they’re only making it easy to perpetuate the linear thinking of books and to not take advantage of what current Web technology has to offer.

Letting Go of the Words talks about performing audience research and then setting up the home page, pathway pages, and information pages in a targeted way. Navigation deliberately and clearly guides users from start to finish, each page and link letting them know they’re on the right track.

You don’t have to set up a help system’s TOC just like you would a book’s. You could organize it in some other way than introduction, chapters, appendix, and so on. But how often do we take the time to do the kind of research we need to in order to make a table of contents even partially effective?

One of the limitations of a TOC is that you can display only topic titles. If you set up pathway pages like Redish describes, you can give the reader more guidance. A risk you take with TOCs is that as the user doesn’t find what he wants, he expands more and more books or folders, and he ends up with an overwhelming list of topics. Instead of holding his hand and leading him along, you’ve paralyzed and frustrated him.

In my experience, help authoring tools don’t lend themselves to dynamic Web outputs that allow you set up this kind of guided experience. You could do it, but it’s not supported well out of the box.

What about Search?

I was talking with my team lead a few days ago about this. He brought up search. Tri-pane help offers search, so how is a website like I’m describing any better?

I’ve got a few responses to this.

• Not everyone searches. Many people do follow links in menus.
• Multiple pathways increase the likelihood that people will find what they want.
• The search function in tri-pane help usually stinks.

I’m a fan of search. If search is well done, it can quickly take users to what they want. If that’s the route they choose. But it shouldn’t be the only way to look, or else we run the risk of the answer to the user’s question being too far down the results list to be found.

Wrap-Up

I think creating tri-pane help tends to lull technical writers into going through the motions. “Okay, I’ve got search, a table of contents with all my topics listed and organized, and as many index keywords as I could come up with. My help is helpful.” We sometimes fool ourselves into thinking that because these boxes are checked, we’ve done a good job at providing quality content and structure.

It would be better for help authoring tools to provide more flexibility so we’re forced to put in the research and thought required for useful content and architecture.

My hope is that in our search for the optimal tool, we find one that doesn’t force into creating tri-pane help and instead allows more flexibility and visual appeal.

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We’ve come to realize that if we want our department to take us seriously and give us the place we want, we need to be equipped to justify the decisions we make on what user education products are right for any given project. One of the things I’d like to see happen in our team is to develop a menu of products, each with a specific definition and an explanation of the situation(s) in which we would recommend that product.

I’ve taken a first shot at this. I’d like your help to flesh this list out, the descriptions, and the reasons you’d use each one. In the comments, please let me know what I’ve left out.

Quick Reference Guide: One-to-eight-page guide that contains reference information, repeatable tasks, or some combination of these. Used when users have small number of tasks or will frequently need to refer to charts, tabular data, and so on.

Quick-Start Guide: One or two sheets that explain the steps for setting something up. Could also provide a set of most common tasks. A throw-away document. Focus may lean toward one-time training.

Short Guide: Thirty-to-forty-page document that provides task steps and reference information. Used when there is too much information for a quick reference guide.

Setup Guide: Document about the same size as a short guide but that is focused on setup tasks. Used when there is too much information for a quick-start guide.

Comprehensive Guide: A full document with fairly complete information about how to complete tasks with the product. Includes reference information and maybe troubleshooting information. Used when a user will perform a wide range of actions with the product, product uses a specific set of terms, and/or product is complex.

Training Guide: A document about the size of a short guide with a focus on teaching the user how to complete core tasks. Concepts build on each other. Examples and exercises are included. Used when someone needs to be trained to use a product by using the product.

Microsoft HTML Help System: A set of HTML files with a table of contents, glossary, and index, all running within a single file (.chm). Installed with software. Used with software installed on the computer hard drive and the user may not have an Internet connection. Contains instructions on completing tasks. May contain context-sensitive topics, reference information, and troubleshooting information.

WebHelp System (or variants): A set of HTML files with a table of contents, glossary, and index. Hosted on a server. Contains instructions on completing tasks. May contain context-sensitive topics, reference information, and troubleshooting information. Used when an Internet connection is common for users.

Knowledgebase: A set of HTML files that contain reference and troubleshooting information.

Web-based Help or Support Site: A dynamic, searchable website containing a variety of topics. Users can comment on topics and browse topics by tag. Allows integration with social media.

Demonstration Video: A recording of the use of a product, usually software, to show how to complete certain tasks. May be used if no test version of the product is available, and practicing with the product isn’t an option. May include voiceover or text captions.

Overview Video: A short introduction to a product that highlights key features. Doesn’t show how to complete specific tasks. Used to give users a brief exposure before they begin using the product or even as an advertisement.

Static Simulation: A video that relies on actions from the user to move forward, typically in what appears to be software. The user must follow a particular path to complete the task, and choices and exploration is limited. May be used as a scripted demonstration so that the demonstration always shows the same functions (and always works).

Tutorial: A blend of demonstration and simulation. Users are shown how to complete a task and then are given the opportunity to try it out.

Wiki: A set of webpages that are editable by any user with an account on the platform. Users can also add and remove pages. Pages have revision histories, and changes may be subject to approval by an administrator. Used when a product has an active community surrounding it whose members are interested in contributing information about the product.

Blog: A website or webpage that is updated regularly, giving updates about a product. Usually somewhat informal in tone. Used when a product’s users want to receive information about a product in between releases.

Release Notes: Short documents, such as a readme file or PDF, that lists the changes in a major release, update, or patch to software.

Inline Help: Text on websites or in applications added to elements to provide some context or examples for using the elements. Used when users may need minimal information to successfully navigate and complete a task.

Embedded Help: Text on websites or in applications that is contained in boxes, sidebars, or modal windows and explains elements in more detail than inline help. Used when further information is required outside the main flow of the webpage or screen.

Tooltip Help: Text on websites or in applications that appears when the user places the mouse pointer over an element for a few seconds. Used when brief hints or reminders are needed and real estate is scarce.

Autocomplete: A text field that provides a drop-down list of options matching typed characters as the user types. Used when only certain options are available, but there are too many to include in a drop-down box, or to provide recommendations.

What would you add? What information have I forgotten from the items here? I’ll update this list based on your comments.

Update: Added release notes, tooltip help, and autocomplete. I wouldn’t have thought of autocomplete features as user assistance, but after it was suggested and I thought about it, I agree. Autocomplete can give guidance so the user doesn’t enter data that the software can’t handle.

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The same thing is true when we’re talking about tools and technology in technical communication.

I see blog or Twitter posts sometimes that insist that some approach is the key or the only way to go. Sometimes, such statements are true—if they support such timeless principles as knowing your audience. But when they set forth some technology or technology-based approach to communication as the silver bullet that will solve all your tech-doc woes, I don’t buy it.

Let’s take some recent examples:

• DITA and XML. I seem to remember when DITA first came out, some proponents claimed that it’s the only way that technical writers should be authoring. They thought everyone should move to it. I’m sure a lot of consultancies sprang up around this hope. More level-headed people acknowledged that if it wouldn’t really make your tech doc processes any faster or cheaper, it wasn’t worth the expense of moving all your written content over. Companies where a very small number of writers are producing content that doesn’t really get reused would be an example.
• Web- or mobile-only documents. Ever heard or read anyone claim “print is dead”? Tell that to people who don’t have access to Internet or mobile signals while doing their work for whatever reason. They have to have paper. Or in cases like the applications I’ve worked on in my current job, where the users are at computer workstations. These are Web apps and have no need whatsoever for mobile help. Saying that all documentation needs to be on the Web or mobile to the exclusion of print is demonstrating a narrow view of the world.
• Social media. Some proponents of social media say that technical communicators must focus their efforts on social media. This isn’t true in all cases. Not every audience spends their time on Facebook and Twitter. Some products require security and shouldn’t have user support broadcasted over public channels. Think of people who work in environments where using social media is forbidden by company policy. They need their documentation delivered somewhere else.

I quickly become resistant to the claims of anyone who calls out any one technology as where I should be focusing my attention in my field. Maybe this reaction comes from my elementary school training on answering true-and-false questions on tests. But such people come across to me as if they’re just saying “ooh, shiny,” enamored of a certain technology they think will solve all their customers’ problems. They’ve found one ring to rule them all (apologies to JRR Tolkein).

We will better serve our audiences by making sure we know where they are so we deliver assistance and training in their preferred channels. We shouldn’t start with a technology and make our strategy fit it. We serve our audiences better if we remain open to various avenues of communication, even using more than one in any given situation.

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Like a lot of ideas, I was probably thinking about something else when this occurred to me. But I’ve got this picture of a div that slides or pops out in the interface when the user wants to see it to get more information. This pane could appear to one side or the bottom of the main section of the page.

Here are a couple of mockups. These are not to scale.

Help appearing to one side

Help appearing at the bottom

The advantages of this approach is that the user doesn’t have to see help unless he or she wants to, and it’s right there in the same window, not covering up anything, so you don’t have to switch back and forth between windows.

Disadvantages are the limited real estate for content and the amount that this may cut into the site or application’s usable space.

One of the main things I like about an approach like this is that I believe user assistance ought to be designed into the interface. It shouldn’t be something added at the last minute like you were deciding what hat to wear today before leaving the house. It’s part of the user experience, so it should be part of the user experience design—with input from the technical communicator, of course.

What do you think? Have you seen this kind of approach anywhere?

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