Last week, I spoke at, and attended, Madworld 2016, the conference hosted by MadCap Software for its users. It’s the most rewarding and enjoyable of all the conferences on technical communication that I attend. Here is a summary of what I saw and heard on the first day.
Category: Technical Communication
Perfecting collaborative authoring for online Help
Yesterday, I wrote: “There are some activities that seem like they always could be improved. One is creating an authoring environment where professional technical communicators and other staff can work together.” Writing online Help is different from writing some other types of content, in that it involves topic-based authoring. Content is stored in modular, re-usable and flexible… Read more »
The return of Clippy?
Are we seeing the the spiritual child of Clippy emerge? Truth Labs’s Stelios Constantinides has written an article on his experiments with conversational UIs. Conversational user interfaces (CUIs) are a spoken or written way of interacting with a device. CUIs aren’t completely new, but they’re becoming smarter, more natural, and — therefore — more useful. Here’s where CUIs come in:… Read more »
API documentation design patterns
One of the current developments in technical communication is the development of a common way to present API documentation. At present, there are a number of different design patterns that organisations are using, but, as with many things, there seems to be a desire to establish a de facto standard. One part of this has… Read more »
Summary of the findings from our 2016 technical communications survey
We asked Technical Authors to complete a survey into the issues and challenges they face in 2016 and beyond. There were four main themes that stood out: Issues around working in an Agile environment. A need to develop skills in creating training screencasts. This included how to use tools, structuring and presenting content, and the ideal… Read more »