From the Doc Side : video tutorial

How do you like your help?

Lindsey Robbins — Mon, 11 Aug 2008 21:00:00 GMT

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 Long, jargon filled, and confusing technical documentation is hopefully outdated. And hopefully too, the short picture diagrams with confusing instructions. How did we ever figure out how to put furniture together before technical communicators? However, we know that’s not always the case.

Why is it so difficult to make help easy? Well one difficulty is keeping up with how fast software can change but more so it’s about meeting user’s expectations for help in the program. Here are some questions we might struggle with on a daily/monthly/yearly basis –

User Guides -

When you access help, do you want a user guide?
Do you want to see the user guide on the screen side-by-side with the program or do you want to print it out and go page by page?
Do you take notes when you print the manuals?
Do you want a lot of detail or does that take up too much time and paper?
Are you a visual learner? Do we need more or less screen captures?
If we have more, that’s more pages and bigger file sizes.
Do you have the internet bandwidth to download big user guides?
How do we document everything but not overwhelm you with the number of user guides?
Do you learn by area of the program or depending on the process you’re performing?

Help Files -
Or, are you the type of user who doesn’t have the time for printed manuals and you just want your answer now. You want to search through a help file or knowledgebase and get back to doing your work.

If you are this type, how do you search?
Do you want similar information as the user guide or do you want just problem solving information?
Do you need visuals?
Do you need a glossary or index?
How do you want the help to appear in relation to the program?
How do you access the help? Do you want to hit F1 on the keyboard? Need a question mark icon to click? Or do you miss the days of Microsoft Word when that paper clip would pop up trying to guess when you needed help?

General Documentation Questions -
Then there is the multitude of other questions we might ask ourselves:

Do you want other user’s advice on what works or doesn’t work? Kinda like user reviews on store websites.
Do you want to be able to edit the content yourself?
Add a comment?
Do you want to save the documentation so you don’t have to remember it?
Do we need more web 2.0 types of content and how would we manage it?
And even more so, how can we marry the help files, user guides with other efforts in the company like knowledgebase, training, and support?

These are a few questions jumping off the top of my head. If I quizzed other team members, I’m sure this post would become exponentially longer. We do know from our documentation survey you still prefer having user guides. But we then have to manage how your expectations might change now and in the future. If we don’t start preparing now we won’t be ready then.

This topic really struck a note with me recently because a well respected technical communicator in the field decided to publish content for her users in the form of a wiki and stop creating manuals.

I’m interested in seeing how this goes. I’m aware that her audience needs might be radically different than ours but when you’re focused on day-to-day tasks it can be hard to remember to look out and see how our field is trending. I’m not sure what our users will ask of us in the years to come. It’s exciting and I know whatever you expect of us, we’ll do our best to deliver top quality.

Have any opinions?

Video Tutorials Debut in the Blackbaud NetCommunity Help File

Nikki Tremann — Wed, 06 Aug 2008 13:44:00 GMT

Does this sound familiar? A coworker sends an email asking you to explain how to do something. You begin your reply, feverishly typing out the necessary steps and details. Half a page later it dawns on you -- it would be easier for both of you if you simply walked over and showed them what you're trying to describe.

Welcome to Tech Writer World! We often face this dilemma when trying to describe a complex process using static text and images. Since we don't have the ability to drop by our users' desks to explain in person, we're happy to announce that we now have the next best thing -- video tutorials! Video tutorials are short demonstrations you watch in a browser that show and explain how to do something in the program.

Our first video tutorial, Processing Individual Signup Requests in The Raiser's Edge, debuts in the Blackbaud NetCommunity 5.5 help files. Let us know what you think and we'd love suggestions for other processes in Blackbaud programs you would like us to address in future tutorials.

Screencasts aka Video Tutorials in the Help Mix

Justin Baden — Tue, 05 Aug 2008 22:11:00 GMT

Recently, Denise Kadilak wrapped up a series of blog posts that explored the cool help functionality we’re building into our next generation applications. To top it off, she just posted an excellent screencast on BBLabs that guides you through the nuts and bolts. If you’re not familiar with screencasts, they’re basically guided UI videos with audio narration.

A few members of the doc team, including Lindsey Robbins, Nikki Tremann and Denise have been exploring the possibilities of producing screencasts to publish along with our other help content. And as you can see from Denise’s example, the exploration was a success. Moving forward, we intend to use screencasts where it makes sense but we won’t overuse them. They’re effective at communicating in a visual way that'll benefit users trying to complete more complex processes… but they’re overkill for more intuitive tasks. We've also decided to call our screencasts "video tutorials," which clearly communicates the purpose to users who may be unfamiliar with the screencast terminology.

In the very near future we hope to have additional video tutorials to share… I know Nikki has a BBNC video tutorial in the works that covers processing individual sign-up requests in RE. Hopefully, we can publish that soon so you can take a look and let us know what you think. In the meantime, drop a comment and let us know what processes you'd like to see made into video tutorials.

BTW – We’re using Adobe Captivate to create our video tutorials.

UPDATE :: Nikki's BBNC video tutorial is posted here. You'll have to log in to view it.