Robert Desprez Communications

Would Faceted Search Assist Your Users?

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Google’s search engine pars­es through mil­lions of web pages and still deliv­ers amaz­ing search results.

Still, even Google’s search algo­rithm has its lim­its. With more and more web con­tent avail­able every day, you can see why Google offered addi­tion­al fil­ters to help you nar­row your search results. For exam­ple, if you’re look­ing for pic­tures of pump­kins, you can type “pump­kins” in the search field and click Images. Alter­na­tive­ly, if you’re inter­est­ed in the lat­est books about Thanks­giv­ing, you can search for that term and click Books.

Com­pa­nies, such as Dell, have used this technique—called faceted search—for some time.  For exam­ple, on Dell’s web site you can search for a lap­top or desk­top com­put­er. Alter­na­tive­ly, you can use the fil­ters to help you search by prod­uct cat­e­go­ry, proces­sor, screen size, weight, and so on.

For users, this pro­vides a lot of ben­e­fits includ­ing the abil­i­ty to be much more spe­cif­ic when look­ing for cer­tain types of content.

Faceted Search and Tech­ni­cal Communication

There has not been a lot of dis­cus­sion about faceted search and tech­ni­cal com­mu­ni­ca­tion. I believe that if your help sys­tem is large (for exam­ple, more than 500 top­ics), a faceted search could help your users search by top­ic type (such as trou­bleshoot­ing con­tent, pro­ce­dures, and con­cep­tu­al mate­r­i­al), train­ing vs. tech­ni­cal com­mu­ni­ca­tion con­tent, HTML ver­sus PDF guides, and so on.

There are, how­ev­er, a few prob­lems with using faceted search with the cur­rent Help Author­ing Tools.

First, most Help Author­ing Tools don’t offer faceted search. So unless you’re using a tool that does offer the func­tion­al­i­ty, you won’t be able to pro­vide it to your users. It’s worth men­tion­ing that Mad­Cap Flare does offer a form of faceted search in its product.

Sec­ond, in my expe­ri­ence, the search in Help Author­ing Tools isn’t great. For many years, Google’s search engine has set the stan­dard for find­ing con­tent online. In con­trast, the out-of-the box search found in a Help Author­ing Tool is mediocre.

Third, I find it’s hard to cus­tomize the search engine in a Help Author­ing Tool. RoboHelp’s search does allow you to tweak con­tent but the last time I looked into it, the search engine is large­ly a black box that isn’t meant to be sig­nif­i­cant­ly customized.

What do you think? Would faceted search help your users? Should it be it avail­able in all Help Author­ing Tools?

COULD TECHNICAL WRITING BE PERFORMED BY SOFTWARE?

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Do you think a soft­ware pro­gram could per­form your job?

Before you scoff, a U.S.-based com­pa­ny has cre­at­ed an algo­rithm that takes data, like sports sta­tis­tics, com­pa­ny finan­cial reports, and hous­ing starts, and turns them into news­pa­per articles.

The code is the work of Nar­ra­tive Sci­ence, offer­ing proof of the progress of arti­fi­cial intelligence—the abil­i­ty of com­put­ers to mim­ic human reasoning.

The New York Times wrote about the com­pa­ny this month: “For years, pro­gram­mers have exper­i­ment­ed with soft­ware that wrote such arti­cles, typ­i­cal­ly for sports events, but these efforts had a for­mu­la­ic, fill-in-the-blank style. They read as if a machine wrote them…[but] arti­cles pro­duced by Nar­ra­tive Sci­ence are different.”

Here’s an exam­ple writ­ten by the software:

“WISCONSIN appears to be in the driver’s seat en route to a win, as it leads 51–10 after the third quar­ter. Wis­con­sin added to its lead when Rus­sell Wil­son found Jacob Ped­er­sen for an eight-yard touch­down to make the score 44–3 …”

Not too shab­by, con­sid­er­ing it was writ­ten by software.

The com­pa­ny appar­ent­ly has 20 clients so far. On its web site, the com­pa­ny notes that the tech­nol­o­gy is being used for sports sto­ries, finan­cial reports, real estate analy­ses, sales and oper­a­tions reports, and mar­ket research con­tent. No men­tion of tech­ni­cal writ­ing but I don’t see why it couldn’t be used for some documents.

I believe that the tech­nol­o­gy could be used for doc­u­ment­ing bug fix­es and new fea­tures that might appear in Release Notes. Of course, there are many things that a writer does every day—such as project man­age­ment and interviewing—that would be dif­fi­cult for a piece of soft­ware to emulate.

This arti­cle reminds me of a blog entry I wrote last year: “In short, some of the high­ly ana­lyt­i­cal jobs are becom­ing com­modi­ties that can be per­formed by a com­put­er or an inex­pen­sive work­er in Asia.” See my ear­li­er blog entry.

What do you think? Could a piece of soft­ware poten­tial­ly write some of your content?

WAYS TO USE TECHNOLOGY TO CONNECT WITH USERS

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Most tech­ni­cal writ­ers have lit­tle idea how their deliv­er­ables are used, if at all.

We strive to ensure that the con­tent is tech­ni­cal­ly cor­rect, that the deliv­er­ables adhere to the com­pa­ny style guide, and that the items ship before or on the agreed-upon deadlines.

After suc­cess­ful­ly ship­ping, mean­ing­ful user feed­back is hard­ly a del­uge, if there’s any­thing at all. More real­is­ti­cal­ly, it is a trickle—some anec­do­tal feed­back that a user liked some­thing we wrote, or an e‑mail that the sales rep­re­sen­ta­tive thought it hit the mark.

Web 2.0 makes it eas­i­er to con­nect to users. Any­one with an Inter­net con­nec­tion and a com­put­er can cre­ate a YouTube video, add some con­tent to a Wikipedia page, write a blog, and so on. For tech­ni­cal writ­ers, this means it’s easy for our users to add com­ments on our help top­ics or web pages.

Here are two rel­a­tive­ly simple—and free—ways you can use tech­nol­o­gy to con­nect with your users.

Feed­back Forms and Commenting
At http://wufoo.com/examples/, you can add many types of forms to a web page or help top­ic with­out hav­ing to code any­thing. Using an embed­ded Con­tact Form, your users do not have to leave the site and you do not have to dis­sem­i­nate an email address that could be a tar­get of spam mail.

Anoth­er site worth vis­it­ing is http://disqus.com, which enables your users to add com­ments to a web site or online help top­ic. Sim­i­lar to a blog, your users can respond to a help top­ic that you’ve writ­ten and you can mon­i­tor and respond to the feed­back by e‑mail using your com­put­er, iPhone, or Android phone. Dis­qus also enables users to click a but­ton when they like a top­ic or web page you’ve authored, with­out requir­ing them to add a comment.

If you’d pre­fer not to add HTML code to your online help or web pages, you can also use Adobe Robo­Help to enable com­ment­ing as you long as you use the company’s Adobe AIR out­put for­mat. To learn more about the details of this option, vis­it tech­ni­cal writer Sarah Maddox’s blog.

HOW GOOGLE CHANGED OUR BRAINS

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Google’s search is so effec­tive at find­ing infor­ma­tion that it’s changed what we choose to remem­ber, accord­ing to Friday’s issue of the jour­nal Science.

When we are aware of where to find infor­ma­tion, we’re less like­ly to remem­ber it, some­thing called “The Google Effect” by lead psy­chol­o­gist Bet­sy Spar­row of Colum­bia University.

The study asserts we’re not becom­ing less intel­li­gent but the ubiq­ui­tous search engine appears to be chang­ing how we remem­ber things. For many of us, we’re hap­py to for­get rote infor­ma­tion, know­ing that it can be retrieved using a search engine.

Google’s search engine is amaz­ing con­sid­er­ing that it index­es mil­lions of web pages and still pro­vides with you with good results. In June alone, web surfers used Google 11.1 bil­lion times, accord­ing to the web site Search Engine Watch.

From what I’ve seen, the search that’s avail­able in a main­stream Help Author­ing Tool (HAT) isn’t near­ly as effec­tive. And if your users are used to results pro­vid­ed by Google (and who isn’t?), the search in online help is bound to disappoint.

Still, even Google’s search engine has its lim­its. Ear­li­er in the year, Forbes pub­lished an arti­cle called “Google Finds No Friend In Face­book As Social Sur­pass­es Search” that states, “Face­book became the most vis­it­ed site in the U.S. for the first time sur­pass­ing Google and Yahoo.” Author Anne Gen­tle wrote in her blog: “…you are more like­ly to get use­ful links by ask­ing your friends and col­leagues about cer­tain top­ics than you are going to get them by search­ing on Google.” That’s prob­a­bly why Google just launched Google+, a social net­work­ing site that is meant to com­pete with Facebook.

In any case, the search offered by a HAT could be a lot more accu­rate and cus­tomiz­able so that writ­ers can con­trol the results offered to users. Who knows? Maybe one day we could make it easy for users to rec­om­mend cer­tain top­ics, like the fea­tures found in Face­book and Google+.

IS HELP 2.0 HYPED?

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There’s been a lot of dis­cus­sion about “Help 2.0” in which users will be able to eas­i­ly com­ment on the con­tent you’ve writ­ten in a help topic.

The Soci­ety for Tech­ni­cal Communication’s Inter­com mag­a­zine recent­ly pub­lished an arti­cle titled “Under­stand­ing the Help 2.0 Rev­o­lu­tion.” I have to admit that I thought the arti­cle con­tained some excit­ing ideas: for the first time tech­ni­cal writ­ers may have an online dia­log with our read­ers using tech­nolo­gies like web posts and commenting.

In the same vein, author and teacher Clay Shirky wrote a book called Cog­ni­tive Sur­plus. In it, he asserts that North Amer­i­cans are watch­ing less tele­vi­sion and are embrac­ing col­lab­o­ra­tive tech­nolo­gies like blogs and wikis. Col­lec­tive­ly, we can pool our efforts to achieve amaz­ing results. Just look at the colos­sal effort of web sites like Wikipedia.

But I think we have a long way to go. For all this talk of col­lab­o­ra­tion, usabil­i­ty guru Jakob Nielsen argues that only one per­cent of peo­ple con­tribute to a site, nine per­cent are inter­mit­tent con­trib­u­tors, and 90 per­cent just read the con­tent. So if Nielsen is right, most peo­ple are still being pas­sive. Doesn’t sound that dif­fer­ent to watch­ing television.

Here’s an excerpt from Nielsen’s web site:

“Blogs have even worse par­tic­i­pa­tion inequal­i­ty than is evi­dent in the 90–9‑1 rule that char­ac­ter­izes most online com­mu­ni­ties. With blogs, the rule is more like 95–5‑0.1. Inequal­i­ties are also found on Wikipedia, where more than 99% of users are lurk­ers. Accord­ing to Wikipedi­a’s “about” page, it has only 68,000 active con­trib­u­tors, which is 0.2% of the 32 mil­lion unique vis­i­tors it has in the U.S. alone.”

Grant­ed, Nielsen’s research is about five years old. Maybe more peo­ple are now con­tribut­ing? But I doubt it’s sig­nif­i­cant­ly more.

Here‘s the bot­tom line. If you’ve cre­at­ed a web site or help sys­tem that incor­po­rates Web 2.0 tech­nolo­gies like com­ment­ing, don’t be sur­prised if you ini­tial­ly receive a trick­le of respons­es from your read­ers. My bet is that tech­ni­cal writ­ers will need to reg­u­lar­ly pro­mote their help sys­tems or web sites to encour­age more read­ers to post their feed­back. If you want an online dia­log with cus­tomers, it‘s not just a mat­ter of “build it and they will come.”

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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