When Kath Straub gave her presentation on Reading beyond the words: How text formatting can enhance the readability and persuasiveness of text at the Technical Communications UK 2009 (TCUK09) Conference she created an unexpected storm. That’s probably because what Kath was saying about a very specific meaning of “text formatting” seemed to be contradicting the current dominant trends in the technical publications field. But I for one was very glad to have heard her presentation as I think I learned a great deal from it. Read more
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User Documentation Survey 2009
I’ve just launched my latest user documentation survey – click here to take part.
Please do take part (it will only take you five minutes), and please pass this invitation on to anyone who might be interested. I’d like to get feedback from people who use the user documentation that comes with gadgets and software, as well as from people who create the documentation.
User Documentation Survey 2008
Every so often I launch a survey about user documentation – sometimes it’s specifically for a conference paper, and sometimes it’s just as a small contribution to the growing body of knowledge in technical communications.
This time I have included three groups of questions: questions for people who create user documentation, questions for people who create technology products, and questions for the most important group of people of all – people who use technology products.
I am launching this survey as an open survey on the internet, and so I know any results will only be indicative, rather than representative of a particular group of users. However I do hope as many people as possible will take part.
I plan to publish the results in the first quarter of 2009, and because I have data from previous surveys (going back to 1999) I may be able to show some trends, particularly in terms of what kinds of documents are being produced.
Please take a few minutes to complete the survey – thank you.
A bit of a grumble
It’s happened to me so many times, I should be used to it by now, but I’m not. I meet people who are involved in product development, and when I try to talk to them about user documentation I get brushed-off with “It’s OK, we do all our user documentation in-house.” “That’s great,” I say, “how many technical writers do you have on staff?”
“Oh no,” they reply, “we don’t have any technical writers, the programmers (or the engineers, or whoever) do it themselves.”
These are intelligent people, who wouldn’t allow anyone other than an experienced and qualified accountant to prepare their company’s balance sheet, or anyone other than a qualified and experienced lawyer to prepare their end-user licence agreement, but they’ll happily entrust preparing their user documentation to someone without any relevant experience or qualifications!
At last, some consideration for users
As I work extensively with companies developing computer software and hardware, I am proud to be a member of the British Computer Society (the BCS). I receive regular emails and magazines and occasionally attend local meetings. This week an email newsletter alerted me to a blog by John Morris on the BCS web site entitled “Data Migration and User Stories“.
Morris writes in praise of “User Stories” used in Agile programming which are (and here he quotes from Wikipedia) “A software system requirement formulated as one or two sentences in the everyday language of the user”. When I read this I didn’t know whether to cheer or to weep. Here is a technical expert in a highly technical field who is at last paying attention to the fact that the system he is building needs to be used by real-world end users – not techies or geeks – to do real-world jobs. I suppose any consideration of user needs is a huge improvement on no consideration at all, so I think I’ll err on the side of cheering.
But putting the needs of the real end user at the focus of technology projects is something everyone should all aspire to, and technical authors, usability specialists, and interface designers have been fighting on behalf of real end users for decades. It’s been a fight because in most cases software developers and other technical experts dismiss our concerns because we’re not programmers. The only things that are new about Agile “User Stories” is that a it’s a cute name for thinking about real end users, and it’s part of a popular development methodology which happens to be the latest trend.
I’ve not been a big fan of Agile, because in most of the implementations I’ve seen the daily scrums and the like focus on minutiae of code, and the big picture goals – helping real-world end users do their jobs – get lost. But if Agile development teams really do develop user stories, and really do keep referring back to them to make sure their project is on track, then there is a glimmer of hope.
