There’s a joke in education along the lines that students are taught the notes their teachers wrote down at university 20 years earlier…without going through the heads of either. I mention this because there have been a number of technical communicators who have started to question the technical writing best practices that have been taught… Read more »
Category: user assistance
Changing times in technical communication 2 – Workflow
We’ve been on the road in recent days and weeks, visiting different documentation teams, and we’ve found there are distinct signs of change. In this post, I’ll look at how we’re starting to see the workflow for creating User Assistance beginning to change. We found many documentation teams overstretched and starting to be asked how… Read more »
Where is User Assistance going? A summary of the bloggers’ thoughts
There’s been quite a few blog posts recently by a variety of bloggers and companies about the current state of User Assistance (such as online Help) and possible ways it could be improved. We thought it might be useful to provide a summary of all the different ideas floating around. This summary primarily looks at… Read more »
You can now create a free iPad magazine for your online Help, training and support content
Flipboard is a popular app for the iPad and Android devices that presents information in a magazine layout. Users can subscribe to different topics, with the content pulled in from the links tweeted by their friends on Facebook and Twitter. They can also view Web sites and blogs (if they contain a RSS feed) as an… Read more »
New design models for providing end user Help
Ray Gallon has recently completed a series of webinars looking at new models for providing end user Help (A Cognitive Design for User Assistance). In the third webinar, Ray looked at how people learn today and he suggested a new approach for the future. He used The Common European Framework of Reference for Language‘s description of… Read more »