Tech Writer Today Magazine - TechWhirl
Technical writing and technical communications news, articles and resources for technical writers and technical communicators.
The Users' Advocate column is written by Mark Baker (and by Geoff Hart prior to 2013) and covers the multifaceted and changing world of technical communication.
Tech Writer Today’s The Users Advocate column is sponsored by Adobe Systems, Inc. Download a 30-day free trial of Adobe FrameMaker 11 here.
As I begin my stewardship of the Users' Advocate column, I think it is important to begin by asking, where have all the users gone? Thirty years ago, tech comm had a more or less captive audience. If users wanted information on your product, they looked at the manual. They didn't have much choice. Today, when the user has a question or encounters a problem with your product, the first thing they do is to Google it. Continue reading ...
Dieter Rams, a German industrial designer from the functionalist school, followed a philosophy that will sound familiar when I paraphrase it: “form follows function” and “usability is fitness for purpose.” You know his work if you've used any Braun products released from the 1960s to the 1990s, or if you've used recent Apple products, many of which were inspired by his design principles. Let’s look at what technical communicators can learn from these principles—and when we should consider violating them. Continue reading ...
Practicalities are obstacles you can solve by choosing an appropriate strategy and then gritting your teeth and doing the necessary work. Because they aren’t psychological barriers, they’re much easier to get past because all you need to do is force yourself to follow the appropriate steps, possibly with help from friends and colleagues. You don’t always need your muse to be able to write: some aspects of writing, such as developing a timeline or plot outline, are fairly mechanical. Since you’re the only one who will see them, they don’t have to be perfect. Continue reading ...
Writing should be exciting and pleasurable, and most of the time it is. But if you’re a dedicated professional who earns your living from writing, writing is also a job, and even the most exciting job sometimes grows boring or frustrating or stressful. When that happens, you may find yourself “blocked”: unable to write, and not sure why. That’s particularly true for technical communicators like me, who also enjoy writing fiction in those rare free moments between paying work. ( Continue reading ...
One of the primary tasks any writer or editor must perform is to impose consistency on a manuscript. Consistency is particularly important for technical writers, because it makes the task of writing easier: if you don’t have to develop a new solution each time you face the same problem, you can simply find a solution that works for all occurrences of that problem and use it thereafter. From the technical writer’s perspective, it’s best if you try to build in that consistency right from the start, because it can save you a lot of time both in your initial draft and in your subsequent revisions. Continue reading ...
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 ...
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 ...