Robert Desprez Communications

FRAMEMAKER 10 ADDS SOME SIZZLE

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I start­ed using FrameMak­er 6.0 back in the late 1990s. For many years, the new ver­sions of Frame seemed, well, bor­ing. Espe­cial­ly when you com­pared it to oth­er tools like Dreamweaver.

FrameMak­er 10 is dif­fer­ent. Released a cou­ple of weeks ago, I found the pre­view video almost excit­ing. With more and more peo­ple watch­ing online videos (think YouTube) and few­er peo­ple read­ing, Adobe appears to have rec­og­nized that even tech­ni­cal doc­u­men­ta­tion could use some pizzazz.

The lat­est ver­sion of FrameMak­er enables writ­ers to embed online videos or online demon­stra­tions dur­ing author­ing. This dynam­ic con­tent will then play in the final PDF.

What’s the ben­e­fit to tech­ni­cal writ­ers? It makes it eas­i­er to deliv­er doc­u­men­ta­tion that offers mixed media. For exam­ple, a hard­ware writer can write how to repair a part using the old stand­by: sta­t­ic pro­ce­dur­al con­tent. But he or she can now also add a 3D mod­el of the part that can be zoomed in on, spun around, and even pulled apart by a click of the user’s mouse.

Soft­ware writ­ers can also ben­e­fit from Frame 10. Writ­ers can aug­ment a pro­ce­dure with a relat­ed Cap­ti­vate video on the same page.
For users, this type of tech­ni­cal doc­u­men­ta­tion could make things clear­er and def­i­nite­ly more engaging.

I know what you might thinking—these online videos and 3D mod­els are not exact­ly easy or quick to pro­duce. True. But if you’re lucky enough to already have online demos and mod­els and you’re upgrad­ing to Frame 10, I think this is def­i­nite­ly worth exploring.

WHY WEB 2.0 IS RELEVANT FOR TECHNICAL WRITERS

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In Decem­ber, I start­ed a dis­cus­sion in a few LinkedIn groups titled, “Most tech­ni­cal writ­ers are not embrac­ing Web 2.0.”

It stirred up a lot of feed­back. Most peo­ple seemed to agree, not­ing that they haven’t had time to research Web 2.0 when wrestling with chal­leng­ing projects, such as set­ting up doc­u­men­ta­tion in XML and DITA.

Some mem­bers, how­ev­er, respond­ed by say­ing that Web 2.0 is just a “mar­ket­ing con­cept,” imply­ing that it has lit­tle val­ue for tech­ni­cal writers.

I strong­ly disagree.

Here’s why I think Web 2.0 is rel­e­vant for us:

  1. Social media is not just a fad and it’s not going away. Quite the opposite—more and peo­ple appear to be using it. Here’s one star­tling fact about Face­book: it has more than 500 mil­lion users and peo­ple spend “700 bil­lion min­utes per month” on the site. In case you’re count­ing, Face­book users out­num­ber the com­bined pop­u­la­tion of Cana­da and the U.S. (Check out Facebook’s sta­tis­tics page.)
  2. We’re no longer the gate­keep­ers of con­tent. In decades past, tech­ni­cal com­mu­ni­ca­tors wrote the tech­ni­cal doc­u­men­ta­tion for a prod­uct and it was the offi­cial con­tent for a com­pa­ny. These days, we no longer have a monop­oly on sup­port con­tent. Online dis­cus­sions may abound about your prod­uct, and most of it is indexed by Google and is read­i­ly acces­si­ble. It’s not uncom­mon to find that this “unof­fi­cial” sup­port con­tent (i.e. forums) is often dis­played before our offi­cial con­tent in search results. This pos­es a chal­lenge to writers—how do we ensure that our con­tent is eas­i­ly found by all users?
  3. Peo­ple are already shar­ing their thoughts on your prod­ucts. With Web 2.0, online com­mu­ni­ties and dis­cus­sions are some­thing we all take for grant­ed. Online com­mu­ni­ties are rat­ing books on Ama­zon. Vaca­tion­ers are rat­ing hotels on Tri­pAd­vi­sor. And they may be rat­ing your prod­uct and your doc­u­men­ta­tion. In short, dis­cern­ing online users have nev­er had so much con­trol over their pur­chas­ing deci­sions. For writ­ers, we should mon­i­tor if users are writ­ing feed­back on our prod­ucts using tech­nolo­gies like Google Alerts.
  4. Writ­ers are already using Web 2.0. Anne Gentle’s book Con­ver­sa­tion and Com­mu­ni­ty doc­u­ments a few exam­ples in which com­pa­nies are using tech­nol­o­gy like wikis for tech­ni­cal doc­u­men­ta­tion. The Adobe Labs wiki, for exam­ple, tar­gets devel­op­ers using Adobe tech­nol­o­gy and is appar­ent­ly one of the top wikis for daily-use.

I believe that Web 2.0 is one of the trends that will for­ev­er change how we do our jobs. Ignor­ing it or sug­gest­ing it’s just for mar­ket­ing folks is seri­ous­ly under­es­ti­mat­ing its importance.

AVOIDING INFOBESITY

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Christ­mas is here and it is a great time to exchange gifts and spend time with friends and family.

Christ­mas is also a time that is syn­ony­mous with over­con­sump­tion and overeat­ing. It seems that every month, I read some alarm­ing sta­tis­tic about North Amer­i­cans’ grow­ing girth. A sig­nif­i­cant por­tion of us are now clas­si­fied as obese.

Now there’s the term infobesity—the ten­den­cy to gorge one­self on infor­ma­tion. British jour­nal­ist John Naish used the term in his book Enough: Break­ing free from the world of more. Here’s an excerpt from the book:

“It involves fighting—and here’s my own new word—infobesity, by restrict­ing one’s data diet. There are com­pelling rea­sons. The glut of infor­ma­tion is not only caus­ing stress and con­fu­sion; it also makes us do irra­tional things such as ignore cru­cial health infor­ma­tion. The British Government’s lat­est sur­vey on our food-buy­ing pat­terns shows that while we are giv­en more infor­ma­tion than ever about healthy eat­ing, our con­sump­tion of fresh food has fallen…We are so wired to gath­er infor­ma­tion that often we no longer do any­thing use­ful with it. Instead of paus­ing to sift our intake for rel­e­vance and qual­i­ty, the dai­ly diet of pruri­ent, pro­found, con­fus­ing and con­flict­ing infor­ma­tion gets chucked on to a men­tal ash-heap of things vague­ly com­pre­hend­ed. Then we rush to try to make sense of it all…by get­ting more.”

Many of us are over­ex­posed to infor­ma­tion. With social media pro­lif­er­at­ing and smart phone adop­tion sky­rock­et­ing, it’s now eas­i­er than ever to read blog posts on the go, see what your vir­tu­al friends are doing, and check out the lat­est videos on YouTube.

As pro­fes­sion­al com­mu­ni­ca­tors, I think we should all be mind­ful of not con­tribut­ing to the del­uge of infor­ma­tion. For a relat­ed post, see Why Writ­ing Less Can Offer More.

WEB 2.0 and TECHNICAL COMMUNICATORS

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Web 2.0 has rev­o­lu­tion­ized the way soci­ety uses the Inter­net. Whether it’s Wikipedia, YouTube, Twit­ter, or LinkedIn, we’ve moved from pas­sive read­ers to active contributors.

Giv­en this fun­da­men­tal change, why is it that most tech­ni­cal com­mu­ni­ca­tors are oper­at­ing as if Web 2.0 nev­er occurred? Based on what I’ve seen, most writ­ers haven’t embraced the col­lab­o­ra­tive mod­el that is com­mon­place with Web 2.0. Why? Here are a few guesses:

  • Some of the web sites are rel­a­tive­ly new. Twit­ter, for instance, has real­ly only tak­en off in the last 18 months. Most writ­ers haven’t fig­ured out whether to use sites like this and how to use them in their jobs.
  • Our tools haven’t ful­ly embraced Web 2.0. The tools that tech­ni­cal writ­ers use don’t ful­ly take advan­tage of Web 2.0. RoboHelp’s new­er Help for­mat, AIR Help, does per­mit users to com­ment on a giv­en top­ic but it doesn’t allow writ­ers to mod­er­ate those com­ments. To me, this is “Web 2.0 lite.”
  • Slow accep­tance of social media by tech­ni­cal com­mu­ni­ca­tion depart­ments. Mar­ket­ing peo­ple have ful­ly embraced sites like Face­book, LinkedIn, and Twit­ter. But from what I’ve seen, tech­ni­cal com­mu­ni­ca­tion depart­ments appear to be tak­ing a “wait and see” approach when it comes to lever­ag­ing these technologies.

Of course, there are orga­ni­za­tions that have tak­en full advan­tage of social media—more on this lat­er. But I believe these orga­ni­za­tions are the excep­tion rather than the norm.

Too bad. I believe that incor­po­rat­ing Web 2.0 tech­nolo­gies into tech­ni­cal doc­u­men­ta­tion could make our con­tent bet­ter, fos­ter more dia­log with our cus­tomers, and change—and improve—our careers.

E‑MAIL’S DARK SIDE

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Most of us are total­ly hooked on e‑mail. We couldn’t imag­ine life with­out it. If my Out­look isn’t flash­ing a pre­view of my lat­est e‑mail, my iPhone is buzzing.

I came across a real­ly inter­est­ing arti­cle on e‑mail titled, “E‑mail’s Dark Side: 10 Psy­chol­o­gy Stud­ies.” Some inter­est­ing find­ings include:

You check more than you think. Accord­ing to this study, par­tic­i­pants claim to check their e‑mails, on aver­age, once an hour. “How­ev­er, when the researchers spied on them, it turned out they checked their e‑mail every five min­utes.” I don’t know that I’m check­ing it that fre­quent­ly but it’s cer­tain­ly more than once an hour.

E‑mail eats a quar­ter of the work­ing day. Researchers found that “this is because peo­ple are not just using e‑mail to com­mu­ni­cate, they are also using it as a way of track­ing tasks.” I guess I fall in that camp: Every day I cre­ate a task list for myself in Out­look and check it through­out the day to mon­i­tor if I’m on track.

It takes 64 sec­onds to recov­er from an e‑mail. Par­tic­i­pants took about a minute to recov­er their train of thought after an interruption.

Low rap­port when using e‑mail. My boss com­plains that no one uses the phone any­more. She has a point. Researchers found that “even a sin­gle tele­phone call can cre­ate enough good feel­ing between the par­ties to bridge the rap­port gap.”

Here’s one of my pet peeves—delivering sen­si­tive news by e‑mail. Occa­sion­al­ly, a col­league decides to deliv­er unpleas­ant news that could be upset­ting using e‑mail. To make mat­ters worse, they “cc” a bunch of peo­ple on the e‑mail. Is it too much to ask to deliv­er the infor­ma­tion in per­son in a some­what sen­si­tive way? On a relat­ed note, one of the stud­ies notes that “peo­ple tend to be more neg­a­tive in e‑mail.”

Check out the study (exter­nal link).

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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