Robert Desprez Communications

Why are Technical Writers Slow to Embrace Mobile?

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Now that Android is the lead­ing oper­at­ing sys­tem used to con­nect to the Inter­net, tech­ni­cal writ­ers need to seri­ous­ly look at how their con­tent is being dis­played on smart­phones and tablets.

For years, smart­phone and tablet use has sky­rock­et­ed.  In 2016, the num­ber of smart­phone users was expect­ed to sur­pass 2 bil­lion (source: eMar­keter). Sim­i­lar­ly, there were about 1 bil­lion peo­ple world­wide in 2015 who used a tablet at least month­ly (source: eMar­keter). In the last few weeks, Android has edged out Win­dows as the num­ber one oper­at­ing sys­tem used to access the Inter­net.

Mean­while, tech­ni­cal writ­ers appear to be slow to embrace mobile. The Con­tent Wran­gler web site com­plet­ed a study last year of more than 700 tech­ni­cal com­mu­ni­ca­tion pro­fes­sion­als. The sur­vey found that 91 per­cent of firms sur­veyed pub­lish con­tent to the web. But only 24 per­cent of tech­ni­cal writ­ers pub­lish con­tent that would be con­sid­ered “mobile ready.”

Sur­prised? I am not.  Although tech­ni­cal com­mu­ni­ca­tions con­fer­ences are brim­ming with ideas about get­ting your con­tent ready for mobile, we are not embrac­ing the idea. You can­not blame the author­ing tools either. In the last few years, Help Author­ing Tools have pro­vid­ed new and for­ward-think­ing fea­tures that make it easy to cre­ate Respon­sive HTML5 and EPUB files. With Robo­Help, you can even cre­ate a mobile app that con­tains online help (I explain the basics of cre­at­ing a mobile app in a sep­a­rate blog post). In addi­tion, these tools are rel­a­tive­ly inex­pen­sive: you can pur­chase some of them on a month­ly sub­scrip­tion basis.

So why are more than 75 per­cent of tech­ni­cal writ­ers not writ­ing con­tent that is mobile ready? Here’s one guess: for all the talk about Dar­win Infor­ma­tion Typ­ing Archi­tec­ture (DITA), writ­ing con­tent for mobile, con­tent man­age­ment, and social media, there are still a lot of com­pa­nies that are using old approach­es and old tools, such as Microsoft Word, to write tech­ni­cal com­mu­ni­ca­tions. The Con­tent Wran­gler study appears to sup­port this the­o­ry with 49% of com­pa­nies sur­veyed still craft­ing print deliverables—just like it was done 20 years ago.

What do you think?

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.

 

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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.

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Robert Desprez Com­mu­ni­ca­tions Inc.
North Van­cou­ver, British Columbia
Canada
Phone: 604–836-4290