Here is a nice use of flash cards as a way of providing user documentation. In this case, it’s the legal rights of New York tenants: Designer and artist Candy Change collaborated with non-profit group “Tenants & Neighbors” to develop and produce a boxed set of 30 flash cards on tenants’ rights. The flash cards translate New… Read more »
Category: user manuals
Managing a documentation project successfully – more jelly and ice cream
This video on simplifying business, using the metaphor of organising a children’s party, made me smile and consider how successful documentation projects are managed. The presenter is suggesting managers need to, in complex systems, give up rigid control from above. Instead, they should watch for organisational patterns, encouraging the good and discouraging the bad. The key to managing a documentation project… Read more »
BBC’s Rory “Read the manual? Never!” Cellan-Jones discovers the need for manuals
I wonder if the BBC’s Technology correspondent, Rory Cellan-Jones, is regretting posting an article in August called “Read the manual? Never!” . In it, he said: It may be sad that we no longer seem to have that thirst for knowledge about how things work. But I’m afraid I’m just not going to start reading… Read more »
Why bother with end user documentation for Web Applications?
In Rahel Bailie’s excellent presentation at the STC Conference (“The New Face of Documentation“), she looked at the “No Documentation” approach to software user assistance. This, she summed up, as the “we don’t document it; we just fix it” view of software development. She argued that a “No Documentation” approach doesn’t lead to no documentation. Users soon… Read more »
What should you include in your user documentation?
Technical authors are faced with limited time and resources, so they often are faced with the dilemma as to what to include and what to leave out of their user documentation. You may ask, if 80% read only 20% of the content, is there any value in documenting the rest? Technical Authors are often great… Read more »