Technical Communication in five words
The Today Programme on BBC Radio 4 ran a piece on the annual Webby Awards that take place tonight. These awards have become (in)famous for restricting acceptance speeches to just five words. This is partly out of necessity as there are hundreds of categories, but this got me wondering how Technical Communicators would approach this task if their work was awarded an award.
Do you train your content strategy’s personality?
Last week I posted an opinion about how one person’s failure to deliver good user assistance tars us all with the same brush. The premise being that if one user has a bad experience with a help file, they’ll be less likely to use it next time. That may not be so bad if they stick to just that product’s user assistance. The trouble is, that malaise can very easily spread to all user assistance. If that happens, we are in BIG trouble.
UA Europe Conference – Free Adobe Day event
I will be attending the User Assistance Europe Conference 2013 in Manchester from 12-14 June. Although the main conference agenda starts on 13 June, an additional pre-conference thought leadership event takes place on the afternoon of the 12 June. Whilst the main conference is organized by Matthew Ellison, the thought leadership event is an Adobe event and features many industry experts. The afternoon starts with an informal lunch, followed by a series of presentations on topical issues facing our industry. After that a panel discussion entitled “Assisting the Millennial User – Challenges and Opportunities in the Decade Ahead” takes place. It promises to be an interesting and informative event. Oh and it is free to attend. Even if you can’t make the main UA Europe Conference, try and make it to the Adobe Day event.
Does your user assistance let the entire industry down ?
One of my tasks this year is to implement a new strategy for delivering our help. Why the change? Firstly, the last change was nearly 4 years ago and our product, industry and customer’s needs have all changed. Secondly, we are well aware of our helps’ limitations. Now we have the time and buy-in to address these issues and I have been organising telephone calls with keys users to ascertain what they want. It is an enlightening process, and one I strongly suggest everyone does. Trust me. You may think you know what your user’s think, but I bet you’ll find out things about them that you’d have no way of discovering unless you did.
Would an Adobe Technical Communication Suite subscription model matter ?
The announcement by Adobe that they will stop shipping packaged copies of their Creative Suite came as no surprise to me. This didn’t stop some eyebrows being raised in some quarters though. So far this pricing model has not been rumored for the Adobe Technical Communication Suite, but if the Creative Suite model is a success don’t be surprised if this changes.
