Recently, a lot of discussion has emerged in social media about user assistance and findability in technical communication and how to design for findability. Faceted navigation and search has been discussed as a solution, and I believe that it may be a promising way out. In fact, a lot of discussion in the technical communication community is about what comes after the "book paradigm". I do see a trend in that more and more technical communicators are saying that we are answering user questions instead of writing books.

As you know from reading my blog, I have for a long time argued that we must predict user questions since we often work in a pre-release mode. And, I have argued that faceted navigation (including faceted search) is a good way to assist users in finding an answer.

But, the product usage behavior users exposes, which sometimes leads to an information-seeking behavior, causes a "problem" for us. To design effective user assistance, we need to understand this behavior I call the "mental model focus behavior". In this blog post, I will explain what I mean. Read more.