Robert Desprez Communications

Is writing for mobile the next big thing?

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With all the news about the sky­rock­et­ing demand for smart­phones over­tak­ing com­put­er pur­chas­es, you might think that tech­ni­cal writ­ers would increas­ing­ly need to focus on writ­ing and deliv­er­ing user assis­tance for mobile devices.

For tech­ni­cal writ­ers, writ­ing for mobile appears to be the next big thing. Here are a few examples:

  • Mobile devices will be the pri­mary con­nec­tion tool to the Inter­net for most peo­ple by 2020, accord­ing to the Pew Research service.
  • Ref­er­ences to mobile phones and tablets are abun­dant at the Writ­er­sUA con­fer­ence and the upcom­ing Soci­ety for Tech­ni­cal Com­mu­ni­ca­tion conference.
  •  Help author­ing tools such as Mad­Cap Flare and Robo­Help tout that they sup­port pub­lish­ing con­tent for mobile devices using the ePub output.
  • There’s even a book ded­i­cat­ed to the top­ic called Devel­op­ing User Assis­tance For Mobile Apps by Joe Welinske.

So along with social media, one might think that cre­at­ing user assis­tance for mobile devices will rev­o­lu­tion­ize the way we work. There’s one prob­lem though.  In the last year, I have yet to see one job descrip­tion in Van­cou­ver that explic­it­ly refers to prepar­ing con­tent for mobile devices. When it comes to tech­ni­cal writ­ing oppor­tu­ni­ties, Van­cou­ver is no Sil­i­con Val­ley but it’s not unusu­al to see five to 10 adver­tised jobs per month.

I don’t think any­one can argue that cre­at­ing user assis­tance for mobile devel­op­ment is too new. Accord­ing to Apple’s web site, there are report­ed­ly 500,000 appli­ca­tions for the iPhone and iPad. There are also thou­sands of appli­ca­tions that run on the Android oper­at­ing sys­tem.  And smart­phones have been avail­able for years. So why is there not a surge in demand for user assis­tance for mobile devices? Some guesses:

  • Soft­ware devel­op­ers are writ­ing the con­tent. While the user assis­tance writ­ten by devel­op­ers may not be pro­fes­sion­al­ly writ­ten and for­mat­ted, per­haps man­age­ment feels that the con­tent  is “good enough”? After all, if a mobile app requires a lot of doc­u­men­ta­tion, it prob­a­bly means that it’s dif­fi­cult to use. Users expect apps to be simple.
  • Per­haps writ­ing for mobile is not big as pre­dict­ed. Employ­ers in Van­cou­ver are not clam­or­ing for writ­ers with mobile expe­ri­ence.  To be fair, I searched for “tech­ni­cal writer mobile” on the U.S. job site www.dice.com and found that 41 of 649 jobs men­tioned “mobile” in the job descrip­tions. Hard­ly a tsunami!
Do you think writ­ing user assis­tance for mobile will be the next thing? Why is there not a stronger demand? I’d be inter­est­ed in your thoughts.

 

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?

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+.

HOW WILL TECHNICAL WRITING CHANGE IN THE NEXT 10 YEARS

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How has tech­ni­cal writ­ing changed in the last 10 years? And how will it be dif­fer­ent in the com­ing years? I start­ed to think about these ques­tions when an old friend asked my opin­ion about how the tools and deliv­er­ables have changed since the late 1990s. She was work­ing as a tech­ni­cal writ­ing man­ag­er back then and is now con­sid­er­ing re-enter­ing the workforce.

I see two notable changes from 10 years ago:

XML author­ing. Of course, one of the main changes in the last 10 years is the wide­spread use of XML when author­ing tech­ni­cal doc­u­ments. Two years ago, Scrip­to­ri­um Pub­lish­ing (http://www.scriptorium.com ) asked more than 600 tech­ni­cal writ­ers whether they write in XML. A major­i­ty of respon­dents were either already writ­ing in XML, imple­ment­ing it, plan­ning to use it, or were at least con­sid­er­ing it. Only 16 per­cent of those sur­veyed didn’t plan to imple­ment it. XML author­ing is not a fad. It’s here to stay.

Improved tools. I start­ed using FrameMak­er 6.0 in the late 1990s. Adobe just released ver­sion 10 in Jan­u­ary. Thank­ful­ly, author­ing tech­ni­cal doc­u­ments has improved sig­nif­i­cant­ly. If you dis­trib­ute PDF doc­u­ments to sub­ject mat­ter experts who make edits in the PDFs, we can now import those edits back into the source files. No more tedious edit­ing. FrameMak­er and Robo­Help can sin­gle source. You can ask sub­ject mat­ter experts to review your files via “the cloud.”

How will tech­ni­cal writ­ing change again in the next 10 years? Here are some edu­cat­ed guesses:

We’ll all be prepar­ing our online help for mobile devices. Smart­phones and tablets are expect­ed to start out­selling com­put­ers in the near future. More and more peo­ple will be using these devices to work and will need tech­ni­cal assis­tance. I expect this is the next “big thing” for us.

Cloud com­put­ing may change how we per­form our jobs. Increas­ing­ly, we may be stor­ing our source files in the cloud, dis­trib­ut­ing tech­ni­cal drafts using the cloud, and even author­ing con­tent using cloud-based soft­ware. See my relat­ed post about cloud com­put­ing.

Social media will change how we com­mu­ni­cate. In my opin­ion, most tech­ni­cal writ­ers are not tak­ing advan­tage of tools like YouTube and Twit­ter. But in the com­ing years, more of us will under­stand how to mar­ry social media and tech­ni­cal doc­u­men­ta­tion. In the April edi­tion of Inter­com mag­a­zine, there’s an inter­est­ing arti­cle called “Under­stand­ing the Help 2.0 Rev­o­lu­tion.” It’s worth check­ing out: www.stc.org. The edi­tion is free too.

These are some of my ini­tial thoughts. How do you think tech­ni­cal writ­ing will change in the next decade?

INSPIRING VIDEO OF WIRED MAGAZINE RUNNING ON AN iPAD

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When Apple unveiled the new iPad yes­ter­day, it remind­ed me of this very cool video—a demo of an elec­tron­ic ver­sion of Wired mag­a­zine that has been opti­mized for use on the device that every­one seems to want. Imag­ine if users could read­i­ly inter­act with elec­tron­ic user guides or help sys­tems this way? Inspiring.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=wwFbwHaP5tE

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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