User-Generated Help: Future of Documentation?

Of late, I’ve been intrigued by something YouTube is doing. They are requesting user-submitted documentation in the form of videos. Well the video part makes sense, right? However, it’s interesting they are reaching out to the audience to supplement their official documentation. Is it fair to put the burden on the users? Fun for users to participate in developing help?

They are now doing a second round of submissions. You can read about it in their blog.  And, you can review the round one selections.

One interesting thing, they didn’t ask for just any help submission, they provided a list of topics to choose from. If your video is selected, it is then posted side-by-side with their content. And, they claim their help gets 1 million + users a day. Not sure if I believe that or not but it’s still interesting (I've never clicked on the their help but maybe I'm an anomaly).

This is definitely a topic I’ll keep my eye on as help and documentation might be figuring out how to join the web 2.0 world. But then the question still remains, when do you ask for user-generated help? I mean, it might be a pure guess on my part but I don't see a million people rushing to create help content. Most people would rather visit the dentist then spend time explaining things to others. Unless you're like me. And if you are, welcome to my crazy cool world.

Have a Helpful Idea?

Your suggestions are heard. Yes, I know it can be hard to believe sometimes but some people (finger pointing at me and the rest of Blackbaud) love to listen. Listening is fun because you don’t have to pretend to know everything. You can let others share their unique experiences, thoughts, and visions with you. And then as Shaun Sullivan said, steal it as your own genius idea. Okay, I don’t think I really have the guts to claim credit from anyone (and I'm pretty sure he was joking) but I do dig hearing other people’s ideas and researching them further.

In fact, a bunch of our technical writers were sitting in Shaun’s Emerging Technology session at Blackbaud’s Conference for Nonprofits this past Monday and listening. He was discussing how you can search the Infinity apps and how it intelligently provides results including an index of our help. And a great question was asked… Can you pull in a 3rd party help to be indexed as well?

Hmmm… good idea!

As our senior technical writer said in the session, we’ll look into it. And let me say, I’m pretty sure we’ll have some great discussions and research about it. Either way, I want to acknowledge that the question was great!

So what’s the point?

I just wanted the opportunity to say we’d love for you to share any other ideas you have. None are bad. All ideas, even in the most basic form, can be sparks for improvement, conversations, and even other ideas. To submit a good idea, leave a comment on the post (login or register for free in the upper right corner) or email us anytime at documentationcomments@blackbaud.com.

Journey from Structred Frame to SharePoint Server Wiki

The journey from last week to this week already feels a decade long as I’ve encountered many trials and errors in converting internal team documentation authored in Structured FrameMaker into a Microsoft SharePoint Server 2007 friendly format. In other words, complex framemaker to basic html.

I’m not complaining about the trials and errors. On the contrary, it’s been exciting to dig my hands into this fun little side project that keeps evolving and building.

Well really, I need to take you back three years to get to the root of where I’m at now. It all started with two separate projects. The first started as learning about how we generate help from Adobe FrameMaker using WebWorks and my lesson was our internal documentation help file the Tech Writer Master. Sounds intimidating doesn’t it? I spent a lot of time updating, organizing, and examining the information design of the help file. Unfortunately, a problem we frequently faced was there wasn’t an easy way to quickly and efficiently update the internal documentation. And as you know, processes, workflows, and general daily work information is fluid and changes often. So I kept the internal documentation as an interest especially because of my passion for knowledge management.

Then that summer, I was tasked along with another co-worker to research how we might, and whether it was valuable, implement our help file as a wiki. We ended up going a different direction with our Infinity help but I was able to bring in my wiki experience and often ask myself what role wikis could have in user assistance content. When the wiki project ran its course, I kept up with the free wiki tools out there and wanted to find a way to install on my own machine and run as a web server for my team. I knew ultimately that having the Documentation team work on a wiki would provide valuable experience in new ways of thinking about content management.

Months went by and my company rolled out Microsoft SharePoint Server 2007 as our internal company content management system.  I knew SharePoint had some wiki capabilities but I had to test it and see if it could work for us. I ended up choosing a Wiki Site from their templates. I played with it and in a matter of days, I had a team wiki set up.  It wasn’t perfect, didn’t have all the features I wanted (especially around navigation), and proved frustrating at times but I was able to get the basics of what I needed up and going. And once it was set up, I presented it to my manager who pushed me to present it to the team.

So now, a few months after my team presentation, my little baby project is growing and providing new challenges. Our team is in the process of implementing it and that means gathering content from everywhere it’s been spread out and organizing it on the wiki. Which brings me to the conversion of docs from FrameMaker to HTML.

I tried a couple different methods before deciding on a winner -

• FrameMaker to PDF. From PDF, save file as html.  Issue: Formatting errors especially concerning images. Would involve too much cleanup.
• FrameMaker, save as XML. XML to HTML using an XSL stylesheet. Issue: Worked sorta, but it would take a long time to convert and would need to spend some time creating a style sheet that fit our wiki needs.
• Winner: I ended up using a basic WebWorks dynamic html template to generate one html file per FrameMaker chapter. I quickly chose the mapping for the Source to WebWorks style but after a few times choosing the styles, I quickly figured out what I wanted for the output. In some cases, I was able to eliminate some formatting later on by choosing not to output certain Frame items. I still had to do some cleanup but mainly that was around cross-references and updating the file paths to the images.

While there is still some manual cleanup in generating the html files, I am glad to have a pretty easy process to get our current documentation into the wiki. And, I even have a new member of my team helping with the setup of the wiki. Between him and I, we’re going to get our team’s content up, properly formatted, and perhaps even some consistency in the style of the content.

My hope, start 2009 with our knowledge management system in place and ready to be updated in real time. To say I’m excited is an understatement. It’s pretty cool to turn an idea into a reality.

What Do Users Need?

A simple question. What do users need? My mind starts thinking about it and I realize there are just too many answers to mentally fathom. Recently, someone on my team shared a great link to discussion results from a recent CIDM conference.

 http://www.infomanagementcenter.com/enewsletter/200811/third.htm

I thought the "What we learned" section contained a lot of great answers. Seems thorough but of course it can never be a complete list. Users' needs are ever evolving and ever changing.

However, one particular statement I've thought about before came up in the discussion.

Users need answers to their questions.

Obvious - Yes. Easy to execute - No. How can you ever provide all the answers to each individual's questions? The answer is you probably can't but you try to answer as many as you can and provide ways to answer the rest by other means.

In Documentation, we recognize that while we aim to help every single user, there are times where your particular situation calls for Knowledgebase or Customer Support. However, that doesn't stop us from trying. Your questions always provide us opportunities to improve our Help.

Here are the main lessons learned from the article...

1. Answer the users' questions and help them do their job.
2. Make it easy for users to find the answer.
3. Provide users access or links to related information.
4. Give users an easy forum for reporting issues and collaborating.
5. Give users information in a format that suits their work environment.
6. Technology is changing user expectations.