As technical communicators we need to understand the types of questions users ask, when and why.  Check out a way to outline the types of questions end users ask from the perspective of the searching user. 

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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.

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First a link to the presentation on DITA and marketing content I co-presented at Intelligent Content:

http://www.slideshare.net/IntelligentContent/dita-for-marketing-content

And then a heads-up that I'll be giving a more detailed overview of lightweight DITA at a webinar on May 14th:

http://www.congility.com/webinar/xdita-and-hdita-marrying-lightweight-di...

And finally, I'll be presenting at the Congility conference in the UK June 18-20. You can get 30% off the registration by using this code:

MPR14SPK

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The goal of this proposal is to align a lightweight DITA profile in XML with an equivalent markup specification based on HTML5. This is not a complete specification, just something to start the discussion going. There's still lots of room for change, as well as for adding specific mappings for additional semantics for learning and training content, epubs, or other formats.

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Many users avoid user manuals since they find it cumbersome to search for information in static structures, such as a table of contents. Technical communicators need to move away from the book-like paradigm altogether, and provide user assistance designed to accommodate the information-seeking behavior of users.

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