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?

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.”

HOW COULD CLOUD COMPUTING CHANGE OUR JOBS?

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Cloud com­put­ing is one of those terms you hear a lot about. Microsoft recent­ly launched a “To the cloud” adver­tis­ing cam­paign. Google offers Google Docs, a suite of cloud-based office soft­ware. I’m work­ing on con­tract for a com­pa­ny that makes gov­ern­ment soft­ware that runs on Sales­force, anoth­er cloud-based com­pa­ny. So it’s notable that there’s lit­tle dis­cus­sion about cloud-based author­ing soft­ware for tech­ni­cal writers.

Cloud com­put­ing basi­cal­ly means soft­ware than runs on the Inter­net ver­sus soft­ware installed on your com­put­er. Adobe FrameMak­er uses the tra­di­tion­al mod­el: you down­load it from Adobe’s site or insert a DVD into your com­put­er and the soft­ware is installed on your hard dri­ve. In con­trast, Google Docs is acces­si­ble via your web brows­er instead of installing it. Once you log on, it’s instan­ta­neous. No more wait­ing for the instal­la­tion. No more punch­ing in long, com­pli­cat­ed ser­i­al numbers.

Soft­ware like Google Docs is catch­ing on. While it’s cur­rent­ly viewed as a “lite” ver­sion of Microsoft Office, it’s improv­ing all the time. Google is also look­ing at cre­at­ing an offline mod­el in case you’re work­ing at a loca­tion that does not have Inter­net access.

For tech­ni­cal writ­ers, there’s not a lot of dis­cus­sion about writ­ing using cloud-based author­ing tools. Think about the benefits:

  • Your soft­ware would be avail­able imme­di­ate­ly. No more waits for a large and some­times slow down­load from a vendor’s web site. I recent­ly down­loaded Adobe’s Tech­ni­cal Com­mu­ni­ca­tion Suite and the process took more than two hours.
  • Your upfront costs are low­er. Cloud-based soft­ware is fre­quent­ly priced on a sub­scrip­tion mod­el. So instead of pay­ing $2,000 for Adobe Tech­ni­cal Com­mu­ni­ca­tion Suite, you would pay a month­ly fee to access Adobe’s soft­ware on the Inter­net. I’d read­i­ly agree to a month­ly fee of say $55 ver­sus $2,000 for a suite of software.
  • Your soft­ware sub­scrip­tion would ide­al­ly pro­vide you with the lat­est ver­sion of the soft­ware. Instead of pon­der­ing whether I should upgrade to FrameMak­er 10, which was just released, my sub­scrip­tion would imme­di­ate­ly give me access to the lat­est features.
  • Col­lab­o­ra­tion could be eas­i­er among writ­ers. As the soft­ware resides on a remote serv­er, you could prob­a­bly store your source files there too. If done secure­ly, this could make col­lab­o­ra­tion eas­i­er. Imag­ine if you need­ed to share your files with a team in India. No more e‑mailing large files.
  • Tech­ni­cal reviews could also be done via the cloud. So instead of crank­ing up Word or Acro­bat on a com­put­er, review­ers could read your mate­r­i­al by review­ing a doc­u­ment that is avail­able on a web site.

Of course the mod­el isn’t per­fect. Per­for­mance, for exam­ple, could be an issue. But if soft­ware ven­dors can ensure a secure envi­ron­ment and offer decent per­for­mance, I think the idea has a lot of merit.

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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