Robert Desprez Communications

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?

MARRYING TWITTER WITH USER DOCUMENTATION

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I just got back from the Writ­er­sUA tech­ni­cal writ­ing con­fer­ence yes­ter­day in Long Beach, Cal­i­for­nia. As I expect­ed, I attend­ed many real­ly inter­est­ing sessions.

Here’s one great idea. Sarah Mad­dox, an Aus­tralian tech­ni­cal writer, works at Atlass­ian, the com­pa­ny that devel­ops JIRA (bug and issue track­ing soft­ware) and Con­flu­ence (web-based cor­po­rate wiki soft­ware). She and her team cre­at­ed wiki doc­u­men­ta­tion that com­bines tra­di­tion­al tech­ni­cal doc­u­men­ta­tion, social media, and links to relat­ed blog posts. Here’s a screen capture:

 

This screen cap­ture shows a sam­ple of Atlassian’s wiki doc­u­men­ta­tion, which includes a Twit­ter stream at the bot­tom of the page.

If users tweet on a giv­en top­ic, they’re reward­ed by giv­en an online badge that they can add to their own blogs or social sites.

Sarah and her col­leagues at Atlass­ian have pulled off a rare feat—content that mar­ries tech­ni­cal doc­u­men­ta­tion, social media, and even viral mar­ket­ing. Because users who decide to tweet are offered an online badge, oth­ers might see the badge on anoth­er site and then tweet as well, which could lead to more and more users con­tribut­ing to the dia­log via Twitter.

This project won the most inno­v­a­tive idea at the Writ­er­sUA “peer show­case.” I think it’s a great idea and well deserved.

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.

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.

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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