Technical communicators are faced with pressure to escape the book paradigm; the traditional book-like manual that is leaving customers frustrated in their inefficient pursuit of information. I make the case that technical communicators are answering user questions, and that instead of organizing information into books, we should provide search aids to make answers easy to find.

So how do we know what questions users ask, and how do we know which facets to use? This article, part 4 in the Designing for the Searching User article series, addresses this question by describing how to predict user questions, in order to build a web knowledge base built according to principles described in part 3. Read more...