Lars-Po Faydöl is a person you’ve probably seen hundreds of time, yet it’s unlikely any of you know who he is. Lars-Po works for Ikea, and the reason why you’re likely to have seen his face is that he appears in pretty much every installation guide that Ikea supplies. You might not recognise him from his photograph,… Read more »
Category: Technical Author
Topic-based authoring: The undiscovered country
Many software companies, when they start out, provide user documentation as downloadable PDFs or as web pages. As they develop more products and versions, and as they expand into countries that use different English spellings, the amount of documents can grow until it becomes hard to keep all of these documents up to date. It’s at… Read more »
Design-led technical documentation
Peter J. Bogaards posted a link on Twitter yesterday to an article and a press release on how IBM is adopting a design-led approach to software design. “IBM Design Thinking is a broad, ambitious new approach to re-imagining how we design our products and solutions … Quite simply, our goal — on a scale unmatched… Read more »
The conversation confusion in technical communication
We noticed last week a few tweets in our Twitter stream about how technical documentation and user assistance will be turning into a conversation. A dictionary definition of conversation is: 1. The spoken exchange of thoughts, opinions, and feelings; talk. 2. An informal discussion. Informal, verbal, interactive, spontaneous communication is quite different from pretty much all forms… Read more »
Getting information from Subject Matter Experts
Interviews with Subject Matter Experts (SMEs) are some of the most useful sources for Technical Authors when they are gathering information about a product or procedure. This often involves asking a developer or departmental manager a series of questions focused on the types of questions end users are likely to ask. Interviewing is one of… Read more »