Technical Communication continues to change as we find new ways to meet the needs of our audiences. I have attended several conferences recently and discussed several of the latest trends with other technical communicators. This article provides a quick list of several of these trends and ideas:
Attend a Conference without Attending
Both the WriterUA conference and the STC Summit in 2009 have proved that you can attend a conference without being there. Don’t get me wrong…there is a lot of value from being involved in the discussions within the program sessions. However, Twitter and ScribbleLive provide several important ways for us to share ideas within our community, which includes members who cannot attend every event.
For example, while at WritersUA in Seattle, I presented a session about using wikis to deliver product documentation. During the discussion, I made the statement, “our job is to help our audience solve their business problems, not just to use our product.” Before I was finished the session, that statement had been tweeted and retweeted as far away as Europe and Austrailia. The world has definitely become a smaller place, and we now have many ways to share ideas and information in real-time.
How Embedded User Assistance Impacts Documentation
Why don’t users read the documentation? In many cases, they need to stop what they are doing, go into the documentation, and find the information they are looking for. Then, they need to return to the user interface, remember what they were doing, and start again where they stopped.
Embedded user assistance relieves this pain point by delivering the information users need when and where they need it. Users no longer need to search for the information they need, and they often don’t even realize they are reading help. For example, a wizard in a product provides a lot of embedded assistance that guides the users through the task.
HTML No Longer Needed
With blog and wiki tools and technologies, are HTML, XHTML, and XML no longer needed? Blogs and wikis allow you to type text entries and these technologies figure out how to display it, often with little or no tagging markup. Their WYSIWYG interfaces continue to improve and expand. As the technology advances, these tools may add processing that can identify list items, tables, and other types of content, and then automatically format them.
Time for Leaders to Emerge
The market is definitely getting tight for technical communicators. Layoffs are occuring in many industries, such as enterprise software development. During these cycles, true leaders emerge and major changes can occur to shape how we approach and solve issues.
Instead of doing more with less, we need to focus on doing less (only what truly adds value). What does the audience really need? When and where do they need it? What deliverables are no longer needed? Are there other ways to effectively meet user needs, such as supporting a user community forum or a wiki?