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Did you know you could listen to our user guides read out loud for free? Well, if you have the free Adobe Acrobat Reader or even the full Adobe Acrobat installed on your Windows computer you have the ability to not only read our guides but listen to them...
Copyblogger's Jennifer Blanchard thinks so and I completely agree. According to the post " How Twitter Makes You A Better Writer ", Twitter helps writers in three ways: Twitter forces you to be concise. Twitter forces you to exercise your...
I’ve been re-reading some old posts in the field, and after reading Amy Hoy's Slash7 post on " How Tech Writing Sucks: The Five Sins ," I started thinking… is it really possible not to commit any one of the five sins? The Five Sins - Losing...
One of my esteemed co-workers shared this awesome article with me last week and now I want to share it with other writers of user assistance content in the field. If you haven’t read it yet, Mike Hughes’ article Straight Talk: Surviving Tough Times as...
One topic I am reading about, that I missed the discussion on over holiday break, is all this talk about whether people trust blogs on corporate websites. While I really don’t know where to put my two cents in about trust and corporate blogs (because...
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...
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...
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...
We often get great feedback about our documentation from our users. Sometimes, it's a friendly head's up of a typo that made its way out into the world (d'oh!). My favorites, though, are when I get to help fulfill a user’s request or search...
In the evolution of software help, user assistance content has taken many shapes and forms. The search for the best way to assist you in your every day work processes is an ever changing quest. Long, jargon filled, and confusing technical documentation...
I love research. I love it so much I research what we could be doing five years from now. I like to know things. Being prepared for upcoming changes is an understatement for me. When I went to the STC conference in June , I saw a demo of Acrobat 9 . Wow...
Even on vacation I couldn't escape documentation. While most people think technical writers explain software or some similar product (and it's true, I do) so many other forms of technical communication exist. On my vacation I was bombarded with...
In my last post about our next generation of help, I provided an end-user view of our new help system and mentioned in passing the customization functionality. In this post, we will take a more detailed look at the customization feature. Customization...
The more I explore help on the internet the more I see humor being used in documentation . Most of the time, I appreciate the unexpected approach to help. But, am I the exception? I’ve often heard how difficult it can be to use humor effectively. Humor...
Early in 2005, Blackbaud Inc. started work on an enterprise version of our constituent management software product. We targeted the software to high-end users interested in a powerful and customizable product, and of course, we wanted the help system...
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