Technical communication

The following is a list of pages on this site that are tagged with technical communication.

In pursuit of the ultimate techCom information architecture

Should the Answer to a User Question be a Short or a Long Topic?

Blog entry: Submitted by Jonatan Lundin on Wed, 2014-02-19 16:07.

A user asks questions when stuck in product use. Displaying information-seeking behavior, they search for answers; and it’s you—the technical communicator—who is responsible for providing them with one. But then you get stuck as you ask yourself: how long should the answer be? As the question of topic size, (as in a DITA topic), continues to be controversial in the technical communication community, we also need to ask ourselves how the size of an answer relates to the size of a topic. My conclusion is that users prefer short answers. Why is this?

Will an answer be easy to find if we mimic human dialog in user assistance?

Blog entry: Submitted by Jonatan Lundin on Mon, 2013-12-23 11:53.

Research has shown that most people avoid using the traditional book-like manual, whether it’s on- or offline. Researchers have provided a number of explanations to why this is the case. One common explanation is that users avoid manuals since they perceive them to be difficult to search.

In response, many technical communicators are exploring innovative new ways to design and deliver user assistance to make manuals more user-friendly. To make the manual an option for the user, we need to make answers easy to find.

Why is the result often a million little pieces even though DITA does not encourage authors to chunk information in such a way?

Blog entry: Submitted by Jonatan Lundin on Tue, 2013-05-07 17:05. Last updated on Mon, 2013-05-13 11:36.

A lot of discussions and confusion in social media has recently, as it seems, dealt with two issues concerning the use of DITA (see for example a discussion in the DITA awareness group on linkedIn or another discussion on LinkedIn or a blog post by Tom Johnson). The first issue relates to the question if topics shall be nested or not, that is, shall DITA topics be kept as separate files or shall authors instead use a <dita> document and nest topics within it?

What principles of organizing content should we adopt instead of organizing content in static book like manuals?

Blog entry: Submitted by Jonatan Lundin on Sat, 2013-04-13 09:41. Last updated on Sat, 2013-04-13 09:41.

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.

What does it mean to predict user questions following a reversed taxonomical approach?

Blog entry: Submitted by Jonatan Lundin on Thu, 2013-03-07 16:05. Last updated on Thu, 2013-03-07 16:05.

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.