Robert Desprez Communications

Optimizing your online help for Google

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Tech­ni­cal writ­ers not post­ing their online help sys­tems to a serv­er that can be accessed and indexed by Google take the risk that their con­tent becomes over­shad­owed by a third-par­ty author­i­ty such as a sup­port forum, said Joe Welinske, pres­i­dent of WritersUA.

In the same way that mar­keters have employed Search Engine Opti­miza­tion (SEO) to improve the vis­i­bil­i­ty of cor­po­rate web sites, online help that can be indexed by the search engines can pro­vide faster answers to your cus­tomers and poten­tial cus­tomers who are using Google, Yahoo, and Bing.

Here are my thoughts on the advan­tages of adding online help to a pub­lic location:

* Your con­tent is giv­en a much wider audi­ence. Instead of lim­it­ing your read­ers to the peo­ple who have bought your prod­uct, your online help can be made avail­able to any­one on the Inter­net. If a cus­tomer is strug­gling with a fea­ture of your prod­uct, he or she could find the answer using Google’s search.

* The rules of sup­port have changed. Peo­ple expect quick and rel­e­vant answers with the wide­spread use of Google. Even with the pos­si­bil­i­ty of social media sites super­sed­ing search engines, 92 per­cent of us still use search engines reg­u­lar­ly. For exam­ple, when I have a prob­lem with some­thing I own, such as a DVD play­er, I might look up the prob­lem in the print­ed user guide (if I still have it!), go to the manufacturer’s web site, or just type the name and mod­el of the DVD play­er in Google. From my expe­ri­ence, Google often pro­vides results that are as use­ful as the manufacturer’s sup­port web site.

* Adding online help to a pub­lic serv­er may ben­e­fit the company’s brand. For exam­ple, tech­ni­cal writer Sarah Mad­dox of Atlass­ian said that the company’s doc­u­men­ta­tion web site attracts more traf­fic than the company’s cor­po­rate web site.

Why are writ­ers not adding con­tent to a pub­lic serv­er? A few reasons:

* We are strapped for time. We don’t have the time to move our con­tent to a serv­er that can be accessed by Google’s webcrawlers that troll and index mil­lions of web pages.

* Com­pa­nies are reluc­tant to post detailed infor­ma­tion to a pub­lic serv­er. Con­ceiv­ably, com­peti­tors could read the details of a fea­ture in your online help and emu­late it. Oth­er com­pa­nies may be wor­ried of secu­ri­ty breach­es. But, in many cas­es, an exter­nal source may already be writ­ing about a company’s prod­uct or ser­vice, said Welinske, who pre­sent­ed at the Jan. 17th meet­ing of the STC West Coast chapter.

* We lack the inter­est or knowl­edge. We may lack the inter­est or the know-how to port the con­tent to a pub­lic-fac­ing serv­er. You need to con­sid­er the type of help you’re gen­er­at­ing, the HTML tags that are embed­ded in each web page, and the for­mat­ting of your help.

Here are some best practices:

* Types of help. If you’re plan­ning to post your help, cer­tain file for­mats work well, such as web pages, Web­Help, and PDFs. Old­er file for­mats such as Microsoft Help (i.e. CHM files) or Flash are not the best choices.

* Opti­miz­ing meta-tags. To help webcrawlers index the con­tent in your help, spend some time adding HTML tags to each top­ic. You need to dou­ble-check the title tags, review your key­words, and add rel­e­vant hyper­links to your help. See my ear­li­er blog post Mak­ing Online Help SEO Friend­ly.

* Social media. Incor­po­rat­ing social media in your online help is a way to fos­ter an online com­mu­ni­ty of users. See my ear­li­er arti­cle on Mar­ry­ing Twit­ter with User Doc­u­men­ta­tion.

* For­mat­ting and pre­sen­ta­tion. In his pre­sen­ta­tion, Welinske sug­gest­ed you need to add nav­i­ga­tion ele­ments and com­pa­ny brand­ing on all pages so that users know that the con­tent is the company’s mate­r­i­al. When you search for con­tent using a search engine, it strips out the table of con­tents and index so that each page should iden­ti­fy that the con­tent is the company’s doc­u­men­ta­tion. In addi­tion, include the last date that the con­tent was updat­ed and which ver­sion the doc­u­men­ta­tion addresses.

* Reg­is­ter your online help with the search engines. It’s worth­while reg­is­ter­ing your online help with Google, Bing, and Yahoo. You can reg­is­ter Google using Google Web­mas­ter Tools. It’s also valu­able to sub­mit a XML sitemap of your online help to search engines. Sitemaps are a way to tell search engines about all of the pages in your online help.

Writ­er­sUA pro­vides train­ing to tech­ni­cal writ­ers and hosts an annu­al conference.

Good pre­sen­ta­tion!

Is the Internet revolutionizing how we read?

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The Inter­net may be chang­ing how we read and think, accord­ing to a five-year study by schol­ars at the Uni­ver­si­ty Col­lege London.

The schol­ars doc­u­ment­ed the behav­iour of vis­i­tors to two pop­u­lar research sites that pro­vide access to jour­nal arti­cles, e‑books, and oth­er sources of writ­ten infor­ma­tion. They found that peo­ple using the sites exhib­it­ed “a form of skim­ming activ­i­ty,” spring­ing from one source to anoth­er. More­over, vis­i­tors rarely returned to any source they’d already vis­it­ed. They typ­i­cal­ly read no more than one or two pages of an arti­cle or book before they would vis­it anoth­er site.

The authors of the study note: “It is clear that users are not read­ing online in the tra­di­tion­al sense; indeed there are signs that new forms of “read­ing” are emerg­ing as users “pow­er browse” hor­i­zon­tal­ly through titles, con­tents pages and abstracts going for quick wins. It almost seems that they go online to avoid read­ing in the tra­di­tion­al sense.”

Patrick Kings­ley of the Guardian wrote an arti­cle about this phe­nom­e­non: “…because of the Inter­net, we have become very good at col­lect­ing a wide range of fac­tu­al tid­bits, we are also grad­u­al­ly for­get­ting how to sit back, con­tem­plate, and relate all these facts to each other.”

When I am using the Inter­net, I typ­i­cal­ly skim con­tent and often feel rushed. Most of the time, I’m research­ing con­tent with a def­i­nite goal in mind—such as draft­ing an arti­cle like this one!

How does this change affect our writ­ing? Usabil­i­ty guru Jakob Nielsen found that most read­ers’ eyes focus on the action-ori­ent­ed con­tent, such as prod­uct fea­tures and bul­let­ed lists. If read­ers encounter intro­duc­to­ry text on web pages, users often skip it. Nielsen calls intro­duc­to­ry para­graphs “blah-blah text.”

But intro­duc­to­ry text does have a role. He writes: “A brief intro­duc­tion can help users bet­ter under­stand the rest of the page. Even if they skip it ini­tial­ly, they might return lat­er if it does­n’t look intim­i­dat­ing­ly long and dense.”

He rec­om­mends writ­ers include the fol­low­ing content:
1) What’s the page about? A brief intro­duc­tion can help users bet­ter under­stand the rest of the page.
2) Why should read­ers care? What’s in it for them?

In this age of hur­ried read­ing, Nielsen’s research makes sense to me. Still with me?

Ruthlessly edit when writing for mobile

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Imag­ine you have a den­tal appoint­ment and you arrive ear­ly. To kill the time, you might skim a copy of Newsweek that’s sit­ting in the wait­ing room. Or, if you are like mil­lions of peo­ple with a smart­phone, you might start perus­ing your e‑mail, surf­ing the Inter­net, or see­ing what’s new on Facebook.

Usabil­i­ty guru Jakob Nielsen com­plet­ed research that shows con­sumers are using mobile phones as time killers, per­fect for when you have five min­utes to spare. The same study also showed that peo­ple are impa­tient with any­thing that’s per­ceived as “ver­bosi­ty.”

In a typ­i­cal news­pa­per arti­cle, it’s not uncom­mon for a reporter to inter­view two to four sources when writ­ing about a nat­ur­al dis­as­ter, such as a hur­ri­cane. When con­sumers are read­ing the hur­ri­cane sto­ry on a mobile phone, they per­ceive those extra view­points as extraneous.

What does all this mean for tech­ni­cal writ­ers? If you’re writ­ing any con­tent that will be appear on a mobile phone, con­sumers want writ­ers to get to the point quickly.

It seems that peo­ple want less and less con­tent. Years ago, Nielsen rec­om­mend­ed that if you write 500 words for a print­ed doc­u­ment, prune that same mes­sage to 250 words when it’s read online. This lat­est study seems to sug­gest that we should be even more ruth­less when it comes to sum­ma­riz­ing our main messages.

It’s not sur­pris­ing that peo­ple want key mes­sages, not lengthy, nuanced expo­si­tion. Many North Amer­i­cans are feel­ing inun­dat­ed with infor­ma­tion, suf­fer­ing from “infobe­si­ty” (see my ear­li­er arti­cle about the top­ic). Many North Amer­i­cans also strug­gle with literacy—Canada has an illit­er­ate and semi­lit­er­ate pop­u­la­tion esti­mat­ed at 42 per­cent of the whole, a pro­por­tion that mir­rors that of the U.S. We’re also dis­tract­ed. It’s not uncom­mon to be “spend­ing time” with some­one when they’re furtive­ly star­ing down at their iPhone or Blackberry.

Like it or loathe it, more and more peo­ple are using smart­phones to get their infor­ma­tion. If you’re writ­ing online assis­tance for mobile users, you need to sum­ma­rize your mes­sages down to bite-sized chunks. Joe Welinske, the pres­i­dent of Writ­er­sUA, recent­ly wrote a series of webi­na­rs about mobile user assis­tance. In his book Devel­op­ing User Assis­tance For Mobile Apps, Welinske writes, “The sin­gle most impor­tant thing I have learned in my work with mobile apps is that bring­ing over Help designs from desk­top appli­ca­tions is a real­ly bad idea.”

So when you’re author­ing con­tent for a mobile envi­ron­ment, be ruth­less with your edit­ing. Imag­ine you are writ­ing for Twitter.

Here’s the full arti­cle about Nielsen’s research.

New technical writing e‑newsletter

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I’m pleased to launch an e‑newsletter that focus­es on using estab­lished and up-and-com­ing tech­nol­o­gy to con­nect and com­mu­ni­cate with your audi­ence. Some of the top­ics I plan to address include:

  • Cre­at­ing user assis­tance for mobile phones.
  • Using tech­nol­o­gy to con­nect with users.
  • Lever­ag­ing Web 2.0 with your documentation.
  • Explor­ing some of the chang­ing aspects of Online Help.
  • And more.

If you find these top­ics inter­est­ing, please sub­scribe. It’s free. And I take your pri­va­cy seriously.

Users struggle with comprehension using mobile phones

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Con­sumers love their smart phones but research com­plet­ed this ear­li­er this year showed that com­pre­hen­sion lev­els for “com­pli­cat­ed” web con­tent were 48 per­cent of desk­top scores.

The study per­formed by R.I. Singh from the Uni­ver­si­ty of Alber­ta found that read­ers strug­gled with read­ing the pri­va­cy poli­cies of 10 pop­u­lar web sites—including Google’s and Microsoft’s—and found that the con­tent was too com­pli­cat­ed. I’m not sur­prised. Last time I skimmed a pri­va­cy pol­i­cy (in fact, I try to avoid read­ing them) it seemed that it was writ­ten by a squad of lawyers. Facebook’s pri­va­cy pol­i­cy was a mind-numb­ing 5,789 words!

The study found that com­pre­hen­sion lev­els were low­er pri­mar­i­ly because of the mobile phone’s small­er size. Users can see less at any giv­en moment and they some­times must scroll around a page, which is distracting.

Usabil­i­ty guru Jakob Nielsen’s arti­cle also states that it’s chal­leng­ing to use mobile phones for the fol­low­ing reasons:
* Slug­gish downloads.
* No phys­i­cal key­board for data entry. Writ­ing a short e‑mail or text is tol­er­a­ble on an iPhone. A longer doc­u­ment quick­ly becomes tedious.
* No mouse for selection.
* Web sites are still fre­quent­ly designed for desk­top and lap­top use.

It seems that once con­sumers buy a smart phone, they love it. Peo­ple often pro­claim that they can’t believe they lived with­out one. But for all the con­ve­nience and the abil­i­ty to com­mu­ni­cate almost any­where, it seems that we have a long way to go to make web con­tent easy to under­stand on mobile phones.

Tech­ni­cal writ­ers are ide­al­ly suit­ed to help ensure that con­tent is opti­mized for mobile use.

Here’s Nielsen’s full article.

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About Me

Robert Desprez I have worked as a Vancouver technical writer for more than 20 years, working at Kodak, Boeing, Teck Resources, and FortisBC. In addition, I have worked as a writing instructor at Simon Fraser University in Vancouver.

Contact Me

Robert Desprez Com­mu­ni­ca­tions Inc.
North Van­cou­ver, British Columbia
Canada
Phone: 604–836-4290