Should technical communicators be designing content so that the right information presents itself to the right person, at the right time, on the right device, and in the right location?

Is it possible? Is this what users want? Read further to discover why I believe that any attempt to design intelligent content in the context of our industry would not only fail, but users would ultimately find such an approach useless. It is important to reflect upon this issue, since what we aim for in the future, informs the decisions we make today. Read more...

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Are you like me, a technical communicator who finds it confusing at times to identify what task to write? Then this article, part 6 in the Designing for the Searching User series, is for you.

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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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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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