Many companies know that customers want new types of content and dynamic delivery but organizations appear hesitant and feel unready to face the challenges. It is a fact that the technical communication community needs to move away from delivering manuals as linear books where content is organized in static arbitrary hierarchies (= table of content). What are the alternatives? Well, the technical communication community can learn much from the academic research community who has used an innovative way of organizing research articles. It is all about making information findable.

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The lightweight DITA proposal for DITA 1.3 is starting to come together. The proposal responds to requirements from the community for a lightweight version of DITA to ease adoption by groups who don't need all the features of full DITA.

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New client, new challenges … including a rapidly-evolving software product. Different clients are using different versions, bug-fixes and incremental changes affect one or two pages out of a couple of hundred – "Niels!" the developers cry: "what can we do?"

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Are you a technical communicator? Do you call yourself an information architect or an information designer? Are you responsible for the design of your company's product manuals? Are you specifying what type of information these manuals contain and how that information is structured? Are you in a process of re-thinking what type of information to include in a manual and how to organize the same information to achieve high findability? Are you uncertain about how to do it? If so, this is the blog for you.

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One of the main reasons behind users not using the manual, when experiencing problems in product use, is because the manual is perceived to require too much effort to use. A user that encounters a problem and starts to seek for help, has a certain level of motivation. Thus the user is willing to invest a certain amount of energy in finding the answer(s). If the perceived effort of using the manual is higher than what the user is willing to invest, the manual is not used.

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