Is writing for mobile the next big thing?

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1. Mark Baker says

   April 29, 2012 at 7:22 pm

   Con­sid­er­ing that tech­ni­cal writ­ing in gen­er­al has not real­ly adapt­ed to the web, which has been main­stream for a decade, I am not expect­ing any rapid shift to mobile any time soon. Actu­al­ly, if tech pubs actu­al­ly did move to the web, that would acom­plish 80 to 90 per­cent of what is need­ed to move to mobile. 

   I real­ly can’t see any great need for help for most mobile apps, which tend to be pret­ty sim­ple and straight­for­ward. Nav­i­gat­ing help on a phone might be more chal­leng­ing that just fig­ur­ing out the app for yourself. 

   The pos­si­ble use of phones and/or tablets for view­ing docs for oth­er prod­uct is more inter­est­ing, though, espe­cial­ly if com­bined with the use of the mobile device as a diag­nos­tic tool. Unless the user is going to be off the net, though, web-ready docs should also be mobile-ready, as long as the writ­ers do not get car­ried away with com­plex lay­out and tables. 

   What I fear is that peo­ple who are still hav­ing a hard time let­ting go of long-form docs may see epub as the suc­ces­sor to PDF and use it as an excuse to con­tin­ue to avoid cre­at­ing real top­ic-based content.

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2. Robert Desprez says

   May 1, 2012 at 3:20 am

   Thanks for your com­ment Mark! 

   In my mind, mobile devices have rev­o­lu­tion­ized the lives of mil­lions of peo­ple but it seems that our jobs may in fact change very lit­tle, at least for the short term. It reminds me of the devel­op­ment of social media, which most peo­ple would agree has rad­i­cal­ly altered how we con­nect with each oth­er and com­mu­ni­cate. Giv­en that we are in the busi­ness of com­mu­ni­ca­tion, I find it sur­pris­ing that it does­n’t appear to have changed tech­ni­cal writ­ers’ jobs that much.

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3. John Mulvihill says

   May 3, 2012 at 5:00 pm

   Oh, UA for mobile is com­ing, all right. The nail-bit­ing ques­tion is, are we ready to adapt to the forms it will take?
   Will tablet-scale enter­prise apps cling to the goth­ic help sys­tems and ref­er­ence man­u­als that doc­u­ment­ed their ances­tors on the PC? With com­pa­nies’ invest­ments in con­tent man­age­ment and all those lega­cy docs, it would be easy to give in to temp­ta­tion and pub­lish mini-me docs for the tablet, at least in the enter­prise world.
   We need to keep in mind that today’s mobile is about where the PC’s pro­cess­ing pow­er was around 1982, when com­pared with the plat­form it was about to replace, the mini. Mini-orig­i­nat­ed word pro­cess­ing apps like Wang’s per­sist­ed for years on the PC until final­ly knocked off by Word.
   Small devel­op­ers, like the tens of thou­sands writ­ing for iOS, place docs at about the same pri­or­i­ty lev­el as tak­ing the recy­cling out of the lunch room. They’re engi­neers, after all, so every­thing is about the prod­uct, not the user. Down here in Sil­i­con Val­ley I’m John the Bap­tist, evan­ge­liz­ing to devel­op­ers of sophis­ti­cat­ed iOS apps that UA needs online rep­re­sen­ta­tion in their mobile products.
   The dearth of author­ing tools for mobile UA (ePub does not count) has giv­en me license to pitch socials-based help to the iOS devel­op­ers. This month I’m clean­ing up the UI for a Bei­jing devel­op­er of a clock-radio prod­uct in the App Store. Fol­low­ing next mon­th’s release of the new build, I’m going to lay the ground­work for socials-based UA, where users will be able to inter­act with oth­er users, and with the devel­op­er. In fact, because this is a fun app, users will be able to com­pete to pro­vide future con­tent, like alarm sounds.
   My sense is the socials will influ­ence UA as much as the plat­form shift to mobile. The gen­er­a­tion who grew up with the socials want their rela­tion­ship with the devel­op­er to be an equal one, where the user can sug­gest new fea­tures or more effi­cient pro­ce­dures. Per­haps the dis­rup­tion to UA caused by social/mobile will enable us to break free from the print par­a­digm that dates back to when users were chained to workstations.
   Imag­ine mobile devices a few years from now not requir­ing key­boards for input. Imag­ine every voice call being a video call. Imag­ine cubi­cles with­out work­sta­tions. Imag­ine Siri run­ning on a quad-core proces­sor and being five times smarter. Docs will still be required, but their form, con­tent, and deliv­ery will be com­plete­ly dif­fer­ent. Will we be ready? We should be plan­ning and prepar­ing for big changes, or our tenure could be under­mined by the UX crowd.
   I think some doc­umeta­tion author­ing devel­op­ers have their heads in the sand. Things are going their way so why dis­rupt the sta­tus quo? I hope I’m wrong about this.
   It’s nat­ur­al for vet­er­an writ­ers to decry the end of the print­ed word as the cur­ren­cy of our trade. But think of the pos­si­bil­i­ties. No more print­ed man­u­als, or man­age­ment of mul­ti­ple ver­sions of same. There will be con­tent man­age­ment, only this time it will be inter­faced with an AI-based deliv­ery sys­tem. How excit­ing is that going to be? Users will engage in dia­log with the knowl­edge avatar and we’ll have a hand in the script. As the social mod­el of col­lab­o­ra­tion is instilled in enter­prise soft­ware, we will ben­e­fit from direct com­mu­ni­ca­tion with the end user, and the user will have access to their peers.

   We are enter­ing the most dra­mat­ic meta­mor­pho­sis in infor­ma­tion tech­nol­o­gy ever — big­ger even than the intro­duc­tion of the PC. If we stand up for the right of users to be informed, and if we pio­neer AI-based, social­ly-ori­ent­ed knowl­edge resources that won’t even be per­ceived as docs, we tech writ­ers stand on the thresh­old of mak­ing doc­u­men­ta­tion rel­e­vant again. Even on mobile devices.

   — John Mul­vi­hill, BA (CMNS), Simon Fras­er Uni­ver­si­ty, Class of ’92

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4. Joan Francuz says

   May 3, 2012 at 7:20 pm

   I feel like an old cur­mud­geon watch­ing a rerun of the same thing when [pick your era] per­son­al com­put­ers arrived on peo­ple’s desks, desk­top pub­lish­ing arrived, email arrived — no one ever thinks they need doc­u­men­ta­tion or train­ing until they’re past the point of no return. Cur­rent rant pre­cip­i­tat­ed by try­ing to use a new Mahjong app on my iPhone. Of course I checked the help. Hah.

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5. Robert Desprez says

   May 8, 2012 at 2:25 am

   Hi John,

   Thanks for your impas­sioned response! Sounds like you are immersed in some very inter­est­ing projects.

   I hope you are right: I would like to see more focus placed on user doc­u­men­ta­tion for mobile. It could be more work, more vari­ety, and some excit­ing chal­lenges for tech­ni­cal writers.

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6. K.Vee.Shanker. says

   May 9, 2012 at 9:52 am

   Hi Robert,
   As John Mul­vi­hill says, tech­ni­cal infor­ma­tion might take a new avatar. If you think sim­ple field-lev­el help, yes, no one is inter­est­ed. When you want the users to go beyond the ‘nor­mal’ use how­ev­er, help files will be demand­ed. No one will refer to help for for­mat­ing a sim­ple let­ter. But, if you want to make a user guide, tech­ni­cal help is inevitable. It is sim­i­lar to the con­tent man­age­ment skill that has tak­en off. No one would have fore­seen it some years back.
   I fore­see tech­ni­cal writ­ers with mobile expe­ri­ence in demand with­in a year or two. Until then, take it as one of the sec­tors to watch!

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7. sudhir subudhi says

   October 16, 2012 at 4:04 am

   Hel­lo Robert,
   There is no ques­tion that peo­ple will go mobile. Com­put­ing will go mobile to com­pen­sate the need for peo­ple to per­form tasks on the move. 

   As you have point­ed out “Soft­ware devel­op­ers are writ­ing the con­tent” is seem­ing­ly the big rea­son why com­pa­nies don’t hire tech­ni­cal writ­ers for the job. Cur­rent smart­phone apps are very small and are sim­ple to use. So they need very lit­tle in the way of instruc­tions. The apps can be designed in such a way that they can do away with this lit­tle amount of documentation. 

   I have down­loaded many Android apps and have run them suc­cess­ful­ly by read­ing only one page Release infor­ma­tion that can be read before down­load­ing the app. 

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8. Bruce Conway says

   July 12, 2014 at 10:43 pm

   Seems to me the whole point of mobile is to steer the user towards “dumb and sim­ple” (excuse the ter­mi­nol­o­gy). I’ve talked to mobile users who assured me that they were “com­put­er illit­er­ate”, almost as if mobile has noth­ing to do with com­put­ers, or at least is a dif­fer­ent uni­verse altogether.

   User doc­u­men­ta­tion for mobile, then, might be seen as admit­tance that mobile is not easy, that it needs explain­ing, so we have to have lit­tle pop­ups or ani­mat­ed char­ac­ters that say “Press the Vol­ume Up but­ton!”, and so on. But these fea­tures pride them­selves as “given“s in the mobile world — not in need of expla­na­tion, user-friend­ly, user-obvi­ous, intu­itive. So, why go print­ing pages of instruc­tions for the smart­phone enduser? Rather than a tech writer, you’d need some­thing more along the lines of a user inter­face expert, rather than a tech writer per se.

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   • Bruce Conway says

     July 16, 2014 at 4:01 pm

     Anoth­er aspect is the com­mu­ni­ca­tion mod­el used in tra­di­tion­al tech­ni­cal writ­ing ver­sus mobile. Mobile would be clas­si­fied as “two-way, sym­met­ric” (infor­ma­tion is exchanged freely back and forth between two par­ties or audi­ences) in Grunig’s 4‑Models of Com­mu­ni­ca­tion where­as help-sys­tems and man­u­als are usu­al­ly “one-way, asym­met­ric” (they push infor­ma­tion out­wards to an audience).

     If you need help on your com­put­er, a real­time chat ses­sion (2‑way, sym­met­ric, where the help author talks “with” you) is actu­al­ly sev­er­al lev­els more use­ful than hav­ing to read 7 pages of how-tos and check­lists — where the help author is silent and dis­tant, mere­ly push­ing the infor­ma­tion at you in a gener­ic and unfriend­ly way via paper or screen (“one-way, asym­met­ric in Grunig’s models). 

     Wire­less and instant, being “right there” in the moment seems to be the new wave, and is like­ly affect­ing the way we com­mu­ni­cate. The lan­guage, for instance, is already acronym-rid­den, short­ened, briefer, more effi­cient in some cas­es, lean and mean to save bytes and trav­el quick­ly through wires and prob­a­bly bounce off mul­ti­ple satellites.

     Social media in gen­er­al is in fact chang­ing cor­po­rate com­mu­ni­ca­tion mod­els to more “two way, sym­met­ric”. Com­pa­nies can now respond to com­plaints more quick­ly and effec­tive­ly using Twit­ter, email, web­sites, chat ses­sions and so on. They’re not mes­sag­ing so much as they’re now con­vers­ing, and the new buzz­word “lis­ten­ing”. Two-way, sym­met­ric “con­ver­sa­tions” stress lis­ten­ing on the, usu­al­ly, cor­po­rate side of things rather than push­ing ques­tion­able or annoy­ing mar­ket­ing instru­ments out at an unsus­pect­ing but still sus­pi­cious public.

     Grunig revis­it­ed: dig­i­tal com­mu­ni­ca­tion and the Four Mod­els of Pub­lic Relations
     Post­ed on Sep­tem­ber 14, 2012 by Stephen Waddington
     http://wadds.co.uk/2012/09/14/grunig-revisited-digital-communication-and-the-excellence-model/

     In oth­er words, they’re lis­ten­ing and start­ing to chat with us more in a vibrant and real­time kind of way, rather than rely­ing too much on sta­t­ic unfriend­ly Help sys­tems and man­u­als, thus putting thou­sands of unsus­pect­ing tech­ni­cal writ­ers out of work. (joke, I hope).

     This kind of thing is stud­ied in “Com­mu­ni­ca­tions Man­age­ment” (called Pub­lic Rela­tions). It might also fall into the sub-area of Rhetoric or Soci­ol­o­gy, but Grunig seems to be the guru behind all this research, start­ing in only 1989 ? or so. For instance, it turns out that com­pa­nies who do switch to a more two-way, chat­ty, friend­lier, open, equal, lis­ten­ing, help­ful style of com­mu­ni­ca­tion with cus­tomers actu­al­ly improve their busi­ness, are gen­er­al­ly clas­si­fied as “excel­lent orga­ni­za­tions” (in the pub­lic rela­tions frame­work devel­oped by Grunig) and make more money! 

     In any case, smart­phones and iPads seem to inspire a i) real­time ii) briefer iii) on-the-spot prob­lem-solv­ing iv) two-way, friend­lier kind of com­mu­ni­ca­tion that may or may not replace tra­di­tion­al­ly-pre­pared tech­ni­cal writ­ing instru­ments, such as Help Sys­tems and manuals.

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