From the Doc Side : web 2.0

Twitter - Can it Make You a Better Technical Writer?

Steve Pham — Thu, 16 Apr 2009 18:19:00 GMT

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 vocabulary.
Twitter forces you to improve your editing skills.

Being fairly new to Twitter, I find myself constantly editing my tweets (the Twitter word for posts) to fit the 140 character limit. Because of this limit, you do have to be careful about what and how you choose to write your messages.

How does Twitter force you to be concise?
There is no getting around being brief. You write more than 140 characters, your message doesn't get sent. You learn fast, capture the gist of what you want to say, and quickly send it out.

Why do you need to exercise your vocabulary?
If you only have 140 characters and have to be concise, you want to choose the most effective words to get your message across without using ones you don't. So you start thinking about ways to say what you want with creative word choice and not extra sentences. Each word matters. When each word matters you think about them a lot more.

What's editing have to do with anything?
Because of being concise and evaluating each word choice, you often have to re-read your messages quite frequently to evaluate whether it's what you meant to say. But, you don't have all day to edit a tweet. Twitter forces you to write better in shorter amounts of time because a medium like this is all about being timely. The posts need to be fast yet good. You can't compromise quality just because it's a microblog. And, you want to send out good content that relfects well on the rest of your content and your skills. Editing well and quickly is of essence.

So how does this help technical writers?
Well a good portion of help authoring is to deliver information as effectively and efficiently as possible so users can get back to the task they were trying to accomplish. Technical information isn't prose or poetry. No one wants to read a book on how to turn on the computer. A tool like Twitter can make you aware of how important each word choice is but it can also teach you to get your message across sooner. As well, I find it encourages creativity in being effective. Creativity is always an important tool in staying relevant in technical communication as well as learn how to meet your users' needs with less space and words. People want help with their problem now and then to move on. Twitter is great then for teaching technical writers to focus on one problem or message and quickly move onto the next task. What do you think? Do you agree? Or, do you think tools and mediums like Twitter are ruining the English language?

User-Generated Help: Future of Documentation?

Lindsey Robbins — Wed, 26 Nov 2008 18:07:00 GMT

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.

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?

Jumpcut - Online Video Editing Tool

Lindsey Robbins — Mon, 28 Jul 2008 13:50:00 GMT

Now that our team’s Docs Day 2008 (team training day) is over, I can start sharing all the fun surprises I had for them in my presentation. I presented on my trip to the Society for Technical Communication Summit in June. I’ll be posting reviews on each presentation I went to as I promised in an earlier post. In the meantime, I wanted to share a fun new tool I used for the lunch time entertainment.

I found this site – Jumpcut http://www.jumpcut.com

Jumpcut is a website that makes adding, editing, and sharing video online easy. In 2006, the company was acquired by Yahoo but I don't think it's taken away from this fun, feature rich site. For me, the easy to use editing part was the reason I chose this site. I had embarrassing footage of me doing the Rocky impersonation in Philadelphia and wanted to add the Gonna Fly Now music to create a silly video of me for my team to laugh at. Then when I started playing on the site it was easy to add photos, more music, and transitions. The only issue I came across was trying to figure out how to transition the music. Also cool, people can remix your video or you can give them permission to edit. The features are all easy to use and the learning curve isn’t that steep. In the end, you have a **free** video you can share with others.

At risk of further embarrassment, I’ll post the video here. Warning – it is 8 minutes long! (I got a little out of control). Also, in the beginning I was making fun of the opening session by posting a picture of each person who presented something before the keynote speaker. It just went on and on! Once you get past those though, it’s all pictures of how much fun I had in Philly.

Enjoy a good laugh on me!

Doing More with Adobe Acrobat and PDFs

Lindsey Robbins — Tue, 22 Jul 2008 15:55:00 GMT

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, it did some slick things. However, it meant it was time to go back to the ~~drawing~~ research board. We've heard of some issues with the Technical Communication Suite that Adobe is promoting with Acrobat 9, so we aren't sure when we plan to upgrade. However, when you're researching five years out you don't worry about small details (I mean, who worries about broken software, lost files, and loss of productivity migraines?). However, this line of thought did produce some questions about what we can do with Acrobat now and what we might want to consider doing this next year, two years down the road, and five+ years down the road.

On the Documentation team, we use Adobe Acrobat as part of the process to create our user guides. Among the things we already provide in our user guides include - bookmarks, table of contents, index, cross reference links, space to make notes in the margins, and more.

A new feature we're testing on the Education Edge, Student Information System, and Financial Edge 7.77 products is a new bookmark - Search the guide. We thought we'd try to make the process to search through a PDF for your content easier. When you click Search the guide, Adobe's search feature opens and you can enter your terms. The PDF search function is pretty good and I use it often when I try to locate existing content. Instead of relying on users to know where in Acrobat to go to for the search feature, we've added the bookmark so it's visibly present when they open the PDF the first time. Simple change but yet we're hoping it improves the usability of the user guide.

For longer term research, I've been hearing about other ways to increase the functionality of the PDF. Recently I received an email about enabling PDFs for comments. In short, this feature would enable users to make comments or notes in the documentation as they use it (very web 2.0 like). I like that it takes information (user guides) our users have already said they like (in our survey) and expand its usefulness. An article from Shlomo Perets discusses some ways to enable PDF comments. For us, it would require an update to our Adobe products and with our issues in the Tech Comm Suite it's not a good decision for us to implement. While we wait for Adobe to sort out its business, I am going to introduce this idea to our usability team. We don't even know if this is a feature users would like so it's time to do some user research.

Other items I've heard about and would like to do user research include -

Information Design. Not really a cool new feature per say but I like reading blogs and articles about how people use content. We redesigned our user guides for the products on the Infinity platform. Now as our software evolves and user expectations evolve, it's good to stay current on the latest research.
Keywords. Add keywords to each PDF and then provide a way for users to search the user guides on our website. We've been looking into this for a while but have been having problems working around how we would do that with the current security settings in place (you have to login to see the user guides). Security issue aside, we have to see how this would affect our current work processes and what the return on investment would be.

However, I know we can't stop there. There is a whole field of information on readers that needs to be explored (you know, in between writing new documentation for all the millions of software product releases we have each month). I love that a part of my job is to look for new ways to enhance our documentation. So if you have any suggestions, tips, or tricks for Adobe Acrobat, please pass them on. Oh and if you have any knowledge of other tips and tricks for other PDF readers out there, I'd be glad to hear about those too. As long as the reader is free for our users, I'm willing to do the research on ways to enhance our user guides. Research on cool new user assistance features is about as cool as The Dark Knight (already one of my all-time favorite movies). In other words, it's too cool for school.

Why does web 2.0 matter?

Lindsey Robbins — Fri, 13 Jun 2008 11:52:00 GMT

I know I write many (and long winded) posts about web 2.0 and my little brain gets excited about all the new technologies that emerge every day. But how can I not? I am sitting mere feet from software engineers who are part of this innovative movement to change the way we use technology. I would talk about them more but we have other people around here (for example, people named Shaun) that can speak far better than me about the Infinity platform and sites like the Blackbaud Labs. So I like to learn about and talk about things in the web 2.0 world that really speak to me as a technical communicator, a geek, and an everyday girl.

If it's hard for you to picture the connection between our software, documentation, web 2.0 websites like twitter, facebook, del.icio.us, google reader, etc and concepts like social bookmarking, rss feeds, blogging (and microblogging), mashups, wikis, podcasts, and more, think of it this way. The more innovation in how people communicate with each other the more we need to innovate in software and software documentation. How much has software changed in the past twenty years. It's legend around here how in the 90's Blackbaud decided to create The Raiser's Edge on an operating system named Windows. And now, with our new Infinity platform, we are part of this exciting movement in software that's more flexible, powerful, and adaptable. And I'm not just influenced by our products, I'm influenced by the social software on the internet. You now expect to interact with software and people differently because of the applications that have emerged over the past couple years.

On our team, for example, our help file is improved on the Infinity platform. Because our technology capabilities expanded and the software our team uses to create the documentation improved, we are able to provide a more robust search engine that makes it easier for you to search for help content. Would we have been able to do that without websites like Google that changed how we expected to search for information? I'm guessing not. New emerging trends have things like folksonomies where users create the tags that identifies information they find. Someday, I hope the industry that creates software for technical communicators (for example, Adobe), can help us create documentation that enables us to include social bookmarking. Wouldn't that be cool, eh? We have lots of cool ideas on our team that we jot down and then work to make happen. Change takes time and patience (which I have little of sometimes). But, as we work on improving you're still changing. And we listen. We keep our ears and eyes open to what your needs and expectations are so when we can, we increase our capabilities to bring you the best user assistance content.

In other ways, I'm also just learning about how people need to use information in their real lives and not just in virtual communities. You expect different things from us and your software than you did ten years ago. After all, that's probably why this regular Blackbaud employee sitting in a regular, gray cube is talking to you through this blog. Chad Norman, is one of our web 2.0 gurus (if not THE guru) who is leading us on this journey to interact better with our clients. He's very encouraging but even I wonder, what the heck am I (one of approximately 1,700 employees) doing writing a blog on the company website? Even if it is weird for me, I still write because I don't want to pass by this opportunity to interact with our clients, colleagues, company leaders, and the technical communication world. It's just too inspiring and too cool to be a part of innovation.

From my perspective, I'm very excited about all of these changes. They force me to grow and they help me stay involved in the process. Just because I do sit in a gray cube, in a sea of gray cubes, doesn't mean I don't want to know how our clients work, how they make a difference, and how in whatever way I can, help make their day easier.

Very delicious or dangerous?

Lindsey Robbins — Tue, 10 Jun 2008 20:01:00 GMT

Being involved in information on a daily basis and trying to keep everything organized in my head I'm always looking for tools to streamline and simplify the process. An online tool that's been on my periphery of late is del.icio.us. del.icio.us is a social bookmarking site. It has a bunch of neat features and yet there is still a lot for me to learn beyond the surface. Here is what I've learned…

Your bookmarks are saved online no matter where you go.
You can share your bookmarks with others or keep them private.
You can network with others in your field or on your team to share your favorite websites, blogs, articles, news, etc.
Do you hate how you search for something but the website creators described it in a way you would never think of? Well del.icio.us takes that away from the powers that be and gives the power to the people. It's a concept called folksonomies. We decide how to describe a site, tag it, and share it. Over time, the more people bookmark something the easier it is for you to find.
You can see your tags in a list, in a cloud, alphabetically, most recent, how often used, or in bundles. However your mind organizes things, del.icio.us can probably accommodate.
Have you gotten to the point where you love google but can't stand the eight billion, five million, and two results that appear. How do you pick which link is the golden ticket? If you're me, you do a lot of clicking and navigating back to the search results. The nice thing about del.icio.us is that it improves google. How?
- Use your network to see what they are reading.
- Because information is organized by how users tag them, you can search based on your word and know you're getting information that's more accurate.
- Save your research on del.icio.us with your comments appended. Other people do the same and you can read their comments. You get an instant evaluation before you even think about spending time searching a website for your research.
If you have some really nice friends, they might even save a link just for you. I can see how that would be awesome on my team. We use email but how easy would it be to lose track of the email?
Subscribe to your favorite tags. If something new appears with that tag, it aggregates itself all nicely for you on your subscriptions page. No more searching for info, sit back and wait for it to come to you.
Post manually or install a plugin for firefox and a button for IE. If you install the plug-in, bookmarking a page is as easy as clicking a button on your browser whenever you are on that really cool website.
Here's a plus that probably only a technical communicator can love, the site has easy to understand help written in an easy to read style.
Are you using Facebook to social network with your constituents, colleagues, peers, etc? del.icio.us integrates with Facebook! Can you feel the synergy?
Does your organization have a wishlist of items? Create a wishlist of items you need, append with comments (like how many, sizes, numbers, etc) and share that with your constituents. If you're like me, it'd be a list of cool things like a wii, a Barnes & Noble gift card, a road bicycle, nike workout clothes, and an iphone that would magically be shared with my family and friends in approximately five months ;-).
Collaborate with your colleagues, co-workers, constituents, donors, volunteers etc to raise the collective knowledge of a group. This could especially be useful if it has bookmarks to news, calls to action, important resources, and more. Just imagine your network helping your organization be better. That might be in the long range plan but in the meantime...

The only part I have yet to figure out is how not to get overwhelmed by all the wonderfully organized and abundant information. I love information but in this context it's almost as if I could get lost in learning. Is that a bad thing? Is social bookmarking too much of a good thing?

The Business Case for Twitter

Lindsey Robbins — Thu, 05 Jun 2008 22:39:00 GMT

Lately, much has been said about Twitter. Chad wrote a great post (Twitter Makes Relationships Work - Right Now) with an explanation of what Twitter is so I'll skip the overview and get to the business case.

Let's start with a little confession I should make… For a while, I had a twitter account but didn't use it much. I wasn't quite ready to be a twitter evangelist. Everything changed for me when I chose a focus for how I was going to use twitter. What I realized was while I didn't always like the concept of letting people know all the mundane things I was doing in my average day, I did like how it could improve my professional and business connections. Here are some ways to use twitter in the business/professional sense.

1. Follow your colleagues. Not only do you create connections across teams but you can stay informed of the latest news in their world. I am following a few leaders in my company with specialties in technology, webby things, marketing, customer support, etc.
2. Follow fellow professionals. This is perhaps my favorite way to connect. I love learning about what other people in my field are learning, doing, finding. I could never keep up with all the changes in technical communication and I don't have to. Instead I can look to peers and mentors for what they find interesting. I share the things I find interesting and our worlds really do expand.
3. Promotion! Share your work content. I am posting a link to our From the Docs Side... blog every time I write one. If we do something else cool, I'll share that too.
4. Tweme the possibilities. If you don't know what a tweme is, it's adding a hash mark to posts so they can easily be found in public streams. I had such a good time at my recent technical communication conference by tweming with other conference goers. Here's our example. Just by putting in a hash mark we could follow each other's post on the same topic. There are so many possibilities with twemes. You could create one for your local professional chapter, a conference, topics in your organization you want to separate, etc.
5. Tweetscan. Tweetscanning is searching all twitter streams for specific keywords. You want to know about technical communication, type that into tweetscan.com and you can find what other people are saying about tech comm and perhaps you'll find some cool new people in your field to follow.
6. Want to know who's the most popular in twitter, go to a site like tweeterboard.com. This site ranks people on popularity. This is again, another way to find noteworthy people tweeting.
7. Support social causes. Movements are happening on Twitter. Just google Frozen Pea Fridays or read here and you can learn how they started a movement to support a woman with breast cancer and ultimately raised money for research.

Either way, definitely re-consider your use of Twitter. You get to control who's in your network and who you want to follow. Also, if you type twitter apps into google, you'll discover new apps are being created daily as people are learning to harness the power of micro-blogging. After all, not everyone has the patience or time to read long blogs like this one. Instead, we want quick updates under 140 characters in length.

Even these guys are tweeting and they're no slouches -

Guy Kawasaki - http://twitter.com/guykawasaki
Robert Scoble - http://twitter.com/Scobleizer
Kevin Rose - http://twitter.com/kevinrose

So, are you ready for the twitter movement?

Wikis Need Some Love (and best practices)

Lindsey Robbins — Wed, 28 May 2008 14:47:00 GMT

Since June of 2006 I’ve been moderating wikis as a part-time job for a company in Seattle. And then soon after at Blackbaud, we’ve explored and researched the use of a wiki as a help file. Since then, I’ve been focusing my efforts on creating an internal documentation wiki as a team development tool. Through my experiences, I’ve learned a few things about how to encourage best practices in wiki use.

Before you implement a wiki, spend time populating it with common topics and a basic set of information. Don’t just hand out a blank one to your team and expect them to figure out what to do with it. By establishing content already in the wiki, people are more comfortable following an example.
Before and during implementation, you need to spend time on the organization. Pages will be added, moved, and deleted. You need to keep the pages organized so that users don’t freak out when they see a mess of pages. People like boundaries, rules, organization – it provides a comfortable structure for them to contribute towards.
People need prompts and templates. Thinking about style and creating easy to use templates always encourages people to contribute more. But don’t expect them to use these things perfectly, clean up will need to be done. And prompts are always good to help guide people towards the behavior you want them to exhibit.
Be an active member yourself. People like strong leadership in a wiki especially where so few will become active participants.
Don’t underestimate providing multiple modes of navigation. Search, most recently updated pages tool, traditional table of contents hierarchy, and tag clouds are just some examples. I’ve also had a lot of success changing up links on the main page to continually bring new content and pages to users’ attention.
Peer to Peer messaging works. People can easily forget what they were doing two minutes ago so I don’t expect them to think of the wiki all the time. Instead, it’s extremely helpful to send P2P messages to users with a combination of prompts and links.
Users really like recognition, polls, and comments. If you can include these three things, you’ll be doing well. Recognition for contributions may be only a pat on the back but it means a lot to community members. Polls are great for opinions and everyone has one. And comments, well that’s a way for community members to connect, ask questions, and in general feel safe from the pressure of actually editing a page. Chances are if you can get them commenting, you’ll eventually get them editing.
WYSIWYG is a given. But going above that, see if you can provide a way to make adding pictures, video, widgets, and more easier. This will not only make the wiki more dynamic but people aren’t always lovers of long pages of static text.
If pages are getting longer and scrolling gives you hand cramps, do your wiki users a favor and break up the content into sub-pages. You can then use the main page as a starting point and create links. Wikis aren’t meant to be books or just content storage. It’s interactive, ever evolving, and (shockingly) fun!
Don’t underestimate the importance of a good moderator/editor. Life in wiki land can easily get out of control if you don’t have someone watching, loving, and caring for your wiki. Or, it can get all dusty and desert like if no one provides some attention to growth whether it’s encouraging participation, providing opportunities to contribute, or keeping pages clean and organized. It will also help if this moderator/editor is an expert in the wiki topics because then they can verify the content as they supervise it. As we all know, wikis can bring the best out of our collective knowledge or the worst and when it comes to work wikis, we all want the best.

Those are just my top ten tips for wiki use but I’ll continue to post on wikis if anything new develops, if you seem excited about wikis, or if I learn something geeky cool that I just have to share with y’all.

And please, if you have questions about my experiences or if you have a problem and want to troubleshoot, just send me an email or add a comment below. I definitely would love to share my passion for wikis with others. I don’t know why it is, but something about community created content gets me all tingly inside.

Where's the download button?

Lindsey Robbins — Thu, 22 May 2008 13:15:00 GMT

Google posted on their blog today that Google Sites is now open to everyone. Curious as I am, I checked out what this new Google Sites feature was. After all, I knew they had acquired Jotspot a while back and now we get to see how they reconfigured it.

It appears to be a combination website/wiki creator. You can control who can edit the pages, view content, etc without having to know html. I love WYSIWYG more than I probably should but even that love will probably not make me an earlier adopter of this option for professional reasons.

The one major flaw in all these websites that make creating websites and wikis customizable and personal is the inherent flaw that instead of you controlling access to the information by having it on your own network, they are all hosted online. And if by some chance there is an option to host it yourself on your own network, well that’s where the fees kick in.

Even though this is a particularly sensitive issue for someone like me who works for a public company, I think it’s an important issue for every organization – private or nonprofit – to consider. I love the value of having software hosted but only if it’s done within the scope of a contract and ensuring your data is protected like we do here.

However, as massive as Google is and as smart as they have been with their apps in the past, I still don’t trust keeping our information on a hosted website. Too vulnerable.

This is something I’ll continue to follow because I have this ongoing dream to have an internal documentation wiki for the Documentation team. We have a lot of information that needs to be managed in order to successfully share with each other and pass on to future technical writers. I’ve been downloading and testing as many free apps as I can find with no luck yet. You need to have more programming knowledge than I have to install. I really think if they can make hosted versions online easy for consumers, why can’t they make installable versions easy too?

In the meantime, I guess it’s back to figuring out the good and the bad about Microsoft’s SharePoint wiki features. Yikes!

Integrating Emerging Technologies on a Daily Basis with Existing Work Processes

Lindsey Robbins — Thu, 15 May 2008 21:46:00 GMT

Something that’s been on my mind a lot lately is the role of emerging technology and how to incorporate it into the documentation process. I’ve known about some of these emerging technologies for a long time but lately I’ve been thinking more about how we would actually go about implementing them on a daily basis. We all want to reach our users in the best possible medium with the most effective means. I especially feel that way about our team at Blackbaud. As a team, we’re always talking and trying to improve our processes and products (for example, see the post on our survey).

For example, I’ve been thinking about these emerging technologies…

Blogs (how we’re going to best use our From the Doc Side blog)
Wikis
Client contact databases
Latest usability trends (including how to best use results from our survey)
Adobe’s Technical Communication Suite
XML and Structured Authoring
DITA
Twitter, Facebook, and all other social networking ways to connect with other professionals and users
User feedback in help files
Short video demonstrations in PDFs (Adobe Captivate flash videos)
3D PDFs (see this example from Adobe)
SEO (search engine optimization)
iPhones and the trend towards mobile phone Internet use
and the list goes on…

However, whenever my brain feels like it’s about to explode, this “but…” appears. It’s this reminder to myself that no matter how cool you become with emerging technologies you still have to do the basics well. I could write a piece of documentation and find this cool new way to make it easily accessible right when you need it most but if I don’t write the explanation very well in the first place, how helpful am I really being to you?

So no matter how much I like to learn and understand all the newest technologies and tools appearing out of nowhere on a constant basis, I want to make sure I’m still doing my basic tasks to the best of my ability.

And, along with doing the basics well, I have to remember that just because we have the power or the ability to do something amazing doesn’t make it the right decision. Just maybe, if people are asking you for a splash pool in the backyard they may not be quite ready for the ocean. Sometimes the simple solution really is the right one even if it’s not the most cutting edge.

Perhaps the answer to my solution to incorporating emerging technologies is to introduce these exciting developments in manageable small chunks and evaluate their effectiveness in an ongoing basis. I don’t want to overwhelm my users and myself when it’s possible for us to get there just not right now.

As you can see, I’m still learning this concept called patience because if I could, I would change into a superhero and improve your world in a day. I know you’re the same way too. So since we’re not getting fitted for red capes anytime soon, let’s work together on this process and see how we can do the basics well. I think if we spend time on the quality and really listen, we can incorporate emerging technologies on a realistic timeframe that’s comfortable for everyone.

What do you think? Have you put any thought to how you're going to integrate emerging technologies into your work processes?