Tech Writer Today Magazine - TechWhirl
Technical writing and technical communications news, articles and resources for technical writers and technical communicators.
SDL announced that industry expert and former Forrester Research analyst Joe Stanhope joins SDL as Chief Strategy Officer of its Campaign Management and Analytics division. Stanhope brings an extensive knowledge and understanding of the creation and application of marketing intelligence from digital channels to SDL. In Stanhope’s new role, he will focus on guiding brands to become smarter about [...] Continue reading ...
To help everyone through another chilly February week, Tech Writer This Week serves up warm and hearty portions of tech comm opinion and commentary. Filling technical communication, delicious content strategy, tempting user experience, finished with some career and life pointers. Continue reading ...
As February tightens its sometimes snowy and frigid grip, TechWhirl continues to scour the web in search of interesting and relevant posts and articles about technical communication. Look for spreadability, stickiness, foodism, and walking away, among other great commentary on technical communication, user experience, and content strategy. Continue reading ...
Noz Urbina advocates a strong link between innovation and great experience throughout the customer lifecycle via content management. His Lavacon 2012 session focused on providing specific audiences the customer experience they want by mapping deliverables to the customer lifecycle. Continue reading ...
"Customer Service Experience" and "Customer Experience Management" may seem like just the latest, trendiest buzz words in business, but a simple Google or Bing search on customer service complaints, produces more than 62 million results, indicating the obvious—that customer service has an enormous impact on businesses. Less obvious, but important in our world, technical communication can have an enormous impact on businesses as well. Continue reading ...
This was a week of varied, but relevant and lively discussions on the TechWhirl email discussion list, the kind of week that shows the broad range of the technical communication field. Section 508 compliance, strategies for organizing help systems, handling production of multi-language documents, tool questions and answers, trends and careers…all of which meant we had conversations with newbies and veterans, in all sorts of industries. TechWhirl’s customers are technical communicators, and our community on the email list is just one way that we stay in touch with our customers. Continue reading ...
I once attended a seminar given by a Vice President for a software development firm. He discussed the business principle time to market. Time to market means, simply, that the sooner a new product is ready for sale the sooner we can make money on it, and the more money we can make overall. We lose money when a new product takes longer to develop. Continue reading ...
As user advocates, we technical writers should be outraged at the hoops our users have to jump through to find the information they need just because different kinds of content are created by different departments. All too often each department pushes content out to customers in their own ways, for their own reasons, which means we’ve created a mess of the entire user experience. Users ought to find everything they need, from training videos to operating system requirements, from high-level content to detailed tasks, from reviews to troubleshooting guides, in one place. I know, what a radical concept: make things easy. Continue reading ...