Tech Writer Today Magazine - TechWhirl
Technical writing and technical communications news, articles and resources for technical writers and technical communicators.
We technical communicators aren’t so different from the rest of the world: we tend to reach a comfortable plateau in our skills, and so long as we’re meeting our deadlines reasonably efficiently using those skills, we tend to lack the motivation to pay close attention to what we’ve been doing and look for improvements. But what if I told you that you could potentially save 15 minutes per day without doing anything more arduous than mastering three new keyboard shortcuts? Continue reading ...
At some point, you’ve undoubtedly found yourself following a procedure that didn’t seem to make sense, or that made sense but was hideously inefficient. But contexts evolve, and procedures gradually drift out of synch with the daily reality employees face. Sadly, most organizations have no formal process for updating their procedures to account for this drift. Here, I’ll boil down my Intercom article on the Kaizen method and chapters from my book into their essential elements, namely the conditions required for successful organizational change and how you, as a technical communicator, can participate in those changes. Continue reading ...
Tech Writer Halloween Horror Stories: I wasn't waking up, and my hands trembled and my heart pounded despite the best efforts of the coffee. When the service ended, the robot and his followers passed among the dormant computers. As they came to each member of the horde, they sprinkled anti-static liquid across the waiting computer, then set about disassembling the patiently waiting machine. As they did, the lesser robots that followed in their wake whisked covers off trays to reveal row upon row of neatly stacked chips, tiny metal legs pointed at the ceiling like so many dead insects. Continue reading ...
Tech Writer Halloween Horrors: When I awoke that morning and stumbled past my office door, the 420XL was gone and in its place sat a new 520. While I washed and scraped the beard from my face, the significance escaped me, but a few cups of coffee later, what passed for my brain at that hour noted the discrepancy. Hadn't it been only a couple weeks since I'd unpacked the 420XL? Not that it was a really big deal, but taking the time to check it out would give the old wetware a few minutes to warm up to operating speed. Continue reading ...
Lately, I've become a vocal critic of modern online help for a variety of reasons. But my biggest criticism is that despite the usability improvements offered by context sensitivity and modern indexing tools, many help systems become formulaic descriptions of procedures that fail to truly address the needs of their users. This problem arises partially from the inherent difficulty of writing online help, since users may need a range of reference, contextual (e.g., why a dialog box exists), or task-based "how to" information at different times and in different places. Continue reading ...
Tech Writer Today’s The Users’ Advocate column is brought to you by Adobe Systems, Inc. Download a 30-day free trial of Adobe FrameMaker here. Editor’s Note: The following piece by Geoff Hart is part of our collection of “classics”–articles that stand the test of time no matter how many technologies come and go. Every technical [...] Continue reading ...
Tech Writer Today’s The Users’ Advocate column is brought to you by Adobe Systems, Inc. Download a 30-day free trial of Adobe FrameMaker here. November 2009, I attended an STC Montreal presentation by John Druker, from SAP Labs Canada. Like many of us, John struggles with the task of getting feedback from his readers about [...] Continue reading ...
Tech Writer Today’s The Users’ Advocate column is brought to you by Adobe Systems, Inc. Download a 30-day free trial of Adobe FrameMaker here. Editor’s Note: The following piece by Geoff Hart is part of our collection of “classics”–articles that stand the test of time no matter how many technologies come and go. I’m going [...] Continue reading ...
In the first part of this article, I introduced the concept of personas, a tool for creating a detailed description of the people we’re writing for. An ideal persona becomes so real that we intimately understand who that person is, what their needs are, the problems they face—and therefore, what we must do to help them solve those problems. To make that admittedly somewhat abstract more concrete, I used the example of Bruce Wayne—the man behind Batman’s mask—because of how instantly familiar that persona is to most Westerners. That description, simplified as it was, provides a strong hook on which to hang more details. Bruce is the answer to the “who?” question, the first of the five W’s. Continue reading ...