Robert Desprez Communications

AMAZING TED TALK HIGHLIGHTS THE FUTURE OF DIGITAL BOOKS

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In a recent blog post, I wrote some of my thoughts on how I think tech­ni­cal doc­u­men­ta­tion may change in the next 10 years. Based on the num­ber of com­ments post­ed, it seemed to gen­er­ate a lot of interest.

On a relat­ed note, I recent­ly vis­it­ed www.mytechcomm.org for the first time. One of the dis­cus­sion top­ics includ­ed a link to an online video that’s avail­able on the TED con­fer­ence web site. In the video, soft­ware devel­op­er Mike Matas presents the first full-length inter­ac­tive book for the iPad.

In the dis­cus­sion group, some tech­ni­cal writ­ers argued that this could be the future of tech­ni­cal doc­u­men­ta­tion. In my opin­ion, I could see some of these tech­nolo­gies being employed. But I’d also haz­ard a guess that cre­at­ing these inter­ac­tive graph­ics is chal­leng­ing and prob­a­bly very time con­sum­ing. What do you think? Here’s the web site: http://www.ted.com/talks/mike_matas.html

MOBILE PODCASTING FOR EMPLOYEES

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Microsoft employ­ees can use an “inter­nal YouTube” plat­form to cre­ate pod­casts, lis­ten to oth­er pod­casts that are cre­at­ed by fel­low employ­ees, and even rate and com­ment on the dig­i­tal files using Web 2.0 technology.

Three years ago, Microsoft launched Acad­e­my Mobile, which is now host­ing thou­sands of employ­ee-gen­er­at­ed pod­casts. The idea behind the plat­form is that any one of Microsoft’s 90,000 employ­ees can share exper­tise with each oth­er. Pao­lo Tosoli­ni, a social video con­sul­tant who launched the ini­tia­tive for Microsoft, was one of the speak­ers at the recent Writ­er­sUA conference.

Here are some of the highlights:

Employ­ees gen­er­ate the con­tent. Any Microsoft employ­ee can share exper­tise on a giv­en sub­ject and upload it to the secure plat­form. Employ­ees have cre­at­ed 19,000 pod­casts to date, there are 800 new uploads each month, and 90,000 down­loads on a month­ly basis.

Pod­cast­ing tools are sup­plied. Microsoft pro­vides each employ­ee with all the audio and video tools need­ed for free as long as the employ­ee agrees to cre­ate three pod­casts per month.

Rewards pro­gram. Each employ­ee earns “points” for each pod­cast pub­lished and addi­tion­al points when anoth­er employ­ee views it. Points can be used to redeem gifts.

Plat­form takes advan­tage of Web 2.0 tech­nolo­gies. Acad­e­my Mobile is built on Microsoft Share­Point but the user inter­face looks dis­tinct from Microsoft’s oth­er cor­po­rate sites. Pao­lo referred to the site as an “inter­nal YouTube” site. Employ­ees can take advan­tage of Real­ly Sim­ple Syn­di­ca­tion (RSS), com­ments, and peer rat­ing of each podcast.

Employ­ees can down­load the pod­casts to a vari­ety of devices. Being Microsoft, you might expect that employ­ees would only be able to down­load con­tent to devices like Microsoft’s own Zune MP3 play­er. But Pao­lo not­ed that Acad­e­my Mobile con­vinced man­age­ment that pod­casts should be com­pat­i­ble with all sorts of devices—including iPhones—so that employ­ees can eas­i­ly lis­ten to the content.

Microsoft’s Acad­e­my Mobile appears to be one inno­v­a­tive way that orga­ni­za­tions can har­ness the exper­tise of their peo­ple. If I was dri­ving to work, I’d def­i­nite­ly con­sid­er lis­ten­ing to a pod­cast and tak­ing advan­tage of Acad­e­my Mobile.

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?

Why I do not love Twitter

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I don’t love Twit­ter. There, I’ve said it. Why?

First, because it con­tributes to a del­uge of infor­ma­tion that is so preva­lent in our soci­ety. Newsweek mag­a­zine recent­ly pub­lished an inter­est­ing arti­cle about how many of us are suf­fer­ing from “infor­ma­tion fatigue.” As a soci­ety, many of us are exposed to more and more infor­ma­tion. Social media, e‑mails, adver­tise­ments, junk mail, tele­vi­sion, radio, and news­pa­per and mag­a­zines offer us an unpar­al­leled amount of news and enter­tain­ment. But all these choic­es can lead to “infobe­si­ty” (see my relat­ed blog post). Most of us think that more choice is a good thing but when peo­ple are faced with too many choic­es they make no decision.

Here’s one exam­ple cit­ed in Newsweek. “In a 2004 study, Sheena Iyen­gar of Colum­bia Uni­ver­si­ty and col­leagues found that the more infor­ma­tion peo­ple con­front­ed about a 401(k) plan, the more par­tic­i­pa­tion fell: from 75 per­cent to 70 per­cent as the num­ber of choic­es rose from two to 11, and to 61 per­cent when there were 59 options. Peo­ple felt over­whelmed and opt­ed out.”

Those peo­ple who sol­diered on and attempt­ed to make a deci­sion often make poor­er choic­es. Researchers found that peo­ple exposed to too much infor­ma­tion “reach cog­ni­tive and infor­ma­tion overload…They start mak­ing stu­pid mis­takes and bad choic­es because the brain region respon­si­ble for smart deci­sion mak­ing has essen­tial­ly left the premises.”

Sec­ond, the stream of Tweets is relent­less. Accord­ing to the Newsweek arti­cle, researchers also found that “recent infor­ma­tion” ham­pers our abil­i­ty to make good deci­sions. “We pay a lot of atten­tion to the most recent infor­ma­tion, dis­count­ing what came earlier…We’re fooled by imme­di­a­cy and quan­ti­ty and think it’s qual­i­ty,” says Eric Kessler, a man­age­ment expert at Pace University’s Lubin School of Busi­ness. “What starts dri­ving deci­sions is the urgent rather than the important.”

Third, I don‘t love Twit­ter because most of the posts are, well, bor­ing. I don‘t care about what peo­ple had for lunch.

Fourth, lack of time. I don‘t have a lot of free time after work­ing full time, par­ent­ing, attempt­ing to exer­cise a few times a week, and keep­ing up with friends and fam­i­ly. I hard­ly watch any tele­vi­sion. So I don‘t under­stand how peo­ple have time to fol­low more than 700 indi­vid­u­als on Twit­ter. I used to think Twit­ter was the social media plat­form for teenagers. But accord­ing to a sta­tis­tic from last year, more than 45 per­cent of Twit­ters users are 18 to 34 years old and 24 per­cent are 35 to 49 years old (website-monitoring.com from May 2010).

To sum­ma­rize, I think Twit­ter has val­ue when it‘s used in cer­tain sit­u­a­tions (check out the recent blog post I wrote about inte­grat­ing Twit­ter with tech­ni­cal doc­u­men­ta­tion). But in gen­er­al, it con­tributes both to the del­uge of infor­ma­tion (most of it not very inter­est­ing or use­ful) and to the con­tin­u­ous real-time onslaught of infor­ma­tion that is con­sid­ered recent. Hav­ing said all that, I am going to try to use it more in 2011 to reach out to oth­er tech­ni­cal writ­ers. Just don‘t expect me to love it.

FIVE WEB ANALYTICS METRICS FOR TECHNICAL WRITERS

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By using Google Ana­lyt­ics tech­ni­cal writ­ers can dis­cov­er what con­tent they write is pop­u­lar, how long users read their con­tent, and where their cus­tomers live. This blog post is a sum­ma­ry of the main points I dis­cussed at my recent pre­sen­ta­tion at the Writ­er­sUA writ­ing con­fer­ence in Long Beach, California.

What is Web Analytics?

First off, web ana­lyt­ics enables tech­ni­cal writ­ers to see how users access your intranet, sup­port web sites, and even help sys­tems that are host­ed on a web serv­er. Some writ­ers that I’ve talked to seem to think that web ana­lyt­ics is com­pli­cat­ed to set up and use. Actu­al­ly, set­ting it up is pret­ty sim­ple, assum­ing you’re com­fort­able with adding a bit of Google’s code to your HTML page. Ana­lyz­ing your data is also pret­ty sim­ple for our purposes.

Why It’s Important for Technical Writers

I believe web ana­lyt­ics is impor­tant for two reasons.

First, it pro­vides insights into how your users are find­ing your site, how they explored it, and how tech­ni­cal writ­ers can enhance their expe­ri­ence. Most of us work in orga­ni­za­tions where there are lim­it­ed resources and a large of queue of work. With web ana­lyt­ics, you can quick­ly dis­cov­er the num­ber of peo­ple review­ing your con­tent for a giv­en peri­od (month­ly, quar­ter­ly, or even dai­ly), and which doc­u­ments are pop­u­lar and which doc­u­ments are large­ly ignored.

Sec­ond, with web ana­lyt­ics, I think that it’s quite pos­si­ble that our writ­ing will be monitored—even scrutinized—in cer­tain orga­ni­za­tions that are inter­est­ed in see­ing the effec­tive­ness of each doc­u­ment and sup­port top­ic we write.

Tris­tan Bish­op, a blog­ger and senior con­tent strate­gist, wrote about the use of web ana­lyt­ics and how it will change our jobs:
“It won’t be long before you’ll know which of your top­ics are mak­ing a pos­i­tive dif­fer­ence, which need some help and which can sim­ply dis­ap­pear. It will soon be painful­ly obvi­ous which team mem­bers are writ­ing the high-impact top­ics, which are writ­ing the unin­tel­li­gi­ble top­ics and which are writ­ing the irrel­e­vant top­ics.” Ouch.

What Can You Measure

For a free tech­nol­o­gy, it’s amaz­ing what you can dis­cov­er using Google Ana­lyt­ics. You can mon­i­tor the num­ber of vis­i­tors com­ing to your site or help sys­tem for a spec­i­fied peri­od, the num­ber of new vis­i­tors ver­sus return­ing vis­i­tors, the aver­age length of time users spend on your site, the key­words they use in a search field, the coun­try they live in, the brows­er they use to access your con­tent, and much more. In fact, if you’re inter­est­ed, you can keep tabs on dozens of met­rics. But for tech­ni­cal writ­ers, I think there are just a hand­ful of met­rics you might want to keep an eye on.

  1. Over­all traf­fic vol­umes. This is impor­tant because it gives you a sense how many peo­ple are read­ing the con­tent you write and sup­port. You can start per­form­ing com­par­isons of this month’s traf­fic ver­sus the pre­vi­ous month’s traf­fic. Are num­bers going up? How is it relat­ed to sup­port calls?
  2. Vis­it dura­tion. In gen­er­al, the longer a per­son spends on your site, the more like­ly he or she will return. In con­trast, if a per­son stays only a few sec­onds, you may deduce that there is noth­ing of val­ue to the user.
  3. Bounce rates. Strict­ly speak­ing, a bounce occurs when a vis­i­tor looks at just one page of your help or web site and then leaves the site quick­ly. If a vis­i­tor comes to your intranet or sup­port site and then imme­di­ate­ly clicks the Back but­ton, it’s con­sid­ered a bounce. If your bounce rate is high (expressed as a per­cent­age such as 50 per­cent), you may be draw­ing the wrong type of per­son to your intranet/site.
  4. Search key­words. Using ana­lyt­ics, you can track the most com­mon key­words that users search for while using your sup­port web site or help sys­tem, pro­vid­ing insight into the con­tent that cus­tomers want. So this may help you understand:
  • What are cus­tomers look­ing for and strug­gling with?
  • What are the most com­mon phras­es when peo­ple are searching?
  • As a writer, do you need to change the way you describe a pro­ce­dure or con­cept so it’s more in line with the way cus­tomers think of it?
  1. Top pages and con­tent. Know­ing what vis­i­tors are seek­ing out can help you tai­lor con­tent for them and help you prune the con­tent that isn’t being used. This may help you focus your efforts when it comes to under­stand­ing the best way to spend your time.

Setting Up Google Analytics

Google has done a good job of explain­ing how to set up web ana­lyt­ics on your web site or online help. For more infor­ma­tion, see http://www.google.com/analytics/discover_analytics.html

Oth­er resources worth reviewing:

Web Ana­lyt­ics: An Hour a Day by Avinash Kaushik
Kaushik’s blog: http://www.kaushik.net/avinash/
Web Ana­lyt­ics Demys­ti­fied by Eric T Peterson
Author Anne Gentle’s blog entry on web ana­lyt­ics:
http://justwriteclick.com/2010/09/01/web-analytics-for-technical-documentation-sites/
Google Ana­lyt­ics by Jer­ri L. Ledford

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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