A Comma Worth $2.13 Million

A grammatical blunder may force Rogers Communications Inc. to pay an extra $2.13-million to use utility poles in the Maritimes after the placement of a comma in a contract permitted the deal's cancellation. [Read More]

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e-learning 2.0 - how Web technologies are shaping education

Written by Steve O'Hear and edited by Richard MacManus. This is a two-part series in which Steve will explore how Web technologies are being used in education. Read on!

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Technical Writers of India (TWIN) Portal Launch Today!

Yours truly will be talking at this event. I was responsible for implementing the CMS (Drupal). Be there if this piques your interest.
Start: 2006-06-10 16:00
End: 2006-06-10 18:30
Timezone: Indian
Where: Nahar Heritage, St.Marks Road, Bangalore
When: 10th June (TODAY!) between 4 and 6:30 P.M.

Event sponsor: Interwoven Inc.

Agenda of the event:

a) Welcome - Sandeep Balakrishna (TWIN Admin)

b) Formal launch of the TWIN community/portal - Mr.John Thomas John is the Vice Dean at the Indian Institute of Journalism and New Media. He has 34 years of experience in journalism in India at Deccan Herald, Indian Express, Statesman and Vijay Times, and Reuters, Agence France-Presse and Business Times abroad. His past work has taken him through a variety of roles from sub-editor, reporter, foreign correspondent, news service head, commentary and editorial writer to being a special projects man and media technology evangelist. He has also had brief academic involvement with two other journalism colleges in India, in addition to his recent part-time association with IIJNM. For more information, please check out http://www.iijnm.org/pro-faculty.html#john

c) About the implementation and the CMS, includes a demo of the portal - Pradeep Vasudev and Suman Kumar

d) How TWIN has evolved as a community - a few senior technical writers

e) Recognitions

This event is free for all and entry is purely first-come-first-serve.

Write to me: Sumank[at]gmail[dot]com

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One Billion Users and Counting

Via Useit.com:Somewhere in 2005 the billionth user of the Internet logged on. Jakob says it could be someone from Shanghai. 36% of the Internet users are from Aisa. 24% are from Europe. Only 23% are from North America.
Now, you tell me who should control the Internet? And who actually does?

Technorati tags: web, internet, usability

Write to me: Sumank[at]gmail[dot]com

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Documentation in RSS Format

Here's my idea for leveraging the power of RSS for usable documentation:

1. Create RSS feeds for documents/manuals and publish it on your support website.


2. The idea is that users that subscribe to a particular document's RSS feed will know when the document is updated. This is possible because users subscribe to RSS feeds using an ?aggregator (desktop or web-based) that polls sites/web pages to which users had subscribed.


3. Your users or customers now can access a particular document or chapter without having to visit your site. This, at the outset, may appear counter-productive but studies show that RSS actually increases website traffic. "BBC news site editor Peter Clifton says the site's RSS feeds delivered 26.7 million click-throughs in July, a 30 percent increase over the previous month." (Source: http://www.cyberjournalist.net/news/002835.php )


4. Customers are notified when a document undergoes a change without the intervention of e-mail.


5. As against mail-based subscriptions and e-mail newsletters, RSS is ?opt-in? and is free of perils—that plague e-mail—?like spam and viruses. Thus, RSS is a safe, secure, usable way for customers to stay in the know about your products and documentation.


6. By de-constructing a document into smaller, logical chunks RSS helps customers to access the information they need without having to skim through the whole manual. Most RSS readers allow users to search for content within subscribed feeds, which again offers redundant access to information for customers.
7. Also, RSS frees content from presentation. Users read RSS content using aggregators or browsers that use their native formatting. I guess most of these readers allow for customization of the format. What's the big deal one may ask; the deal is that users choose how they view your document.


8. RSS frees your 200-page manual from the clutches of PDF. PDF is not a friendly format for online consumption. And, if your document is a 20MB monster, it will eat up bandwidth and freeze your customer's computing resources. While PDF is excellent for print, it sucks online. HTML is an alternative, but it lacks the pinging/notification features of RSS and is a spoilt brat thanks to competing browsers and lack of rigid standards until recently. RSS standsout as a fluid yet robust alternative to boost your document's usability. It is gaining wide acceptance as we speak, and is fast losing its complexity. Gasp! Please bear with the verbosity guys!


9. Firefox supports RSS auto-discovery and subscription features (the orange icon at bottom-right the right in the address bar).


10. Internet Explorer 7 will have RSS support built-in. See related entry on MSDN: http://blogs.msdn.com/ie/archive/2005/08/02/446280.aspx


11. RSS allows customers easy access to specific sections of a document and by boosting the readability of documents (because information is chunked in RSS) it encourages users to use documentation to solve issues rather than call or e-mail your support team. Thus RSS is one of the most significant ways to cut-down support costs and improve customer satisfaction.


12. Last, but most important, generating RSS versions of your documentation will not involve any major extra effort. If you already use XML to create documentation (via structured Framemaker or other tools), you just have to modify your XSLT to generate another output in RSS format.
    

What do you guys think? Have your tried it in your work? If yes, please share your thoughts.

Technorati tags: RSS, documentation, technical writing, communication

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10 Ways to Please Us, the Customers

NYT published this list. I thought the ones below might ring a bell to all you tech writers out there:

II. Thou shalt hire native English speakers to translate thine instruction manual. "When the camera focus is not so possible, hold the shutter button vaguely until the beeping tone is heard." Is that really how your company wants to address customers?

Talk about New Math. You'll spend millions of dollars developing some breakthrough gizmo, but won't spring for somebody to rewrite your manual in proper English? I know some high schoolers who'd do the job for $50 and 10 free ring tones.



VI. Thou shalt not hide from thy customers. If you've designed your product properly and provided a decent manual in English, you ought to have nothing to hide; there should be very little reason to worry that we, the masses, will jam your phone lines asking for help.

Thanks King!

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Top Ten Documentation Heuristics by Vesa Purho

"For example, people working on a rooftop installing some hardware would not necessarily be delighted with nice multimedia CD-ROMs but prefer a laminated quick reference card."

That statement pretty much sums it up for me. Read on!

1. Match between documentation and the real world

The documentation should speak the users' language, with words, phrases, and concepts familiar to the user, rather than system-oriented terms. Follow real-world conventions, making information appear in a natural and logical order.



2. Match between documentation and the product

The forms, screens, manuals, and online helps system should match so that the same terminology is used in all of them. This may contradict with "Match between the documentation and real world" if the interface uses strange terminology.



3. Purposeful documentation

If the documentation set contains several documents, the purpose of each type of document should be clear, as well as the intended use. The media of the documentation must be purposeful so that users get what they need. For example, people working on a rooftop installing some hardware would not necessarily be delighted with nice multimedia CD-ROMs but prefer a laminated quick reference card.



4. Support for different users

The documentation should support users with different levels of knowledge on the domain as well as those assigned different tasks in the domain. Any unnecessary information for a specific user must be hidden from other users or be easily overlooked. Quick reference information for expert users should be available.



5. Effective information design

Information must be presented in a way that it is easily found and understood by the users. Short lines and paragraphs are easier to read. Graphics, tables, and lists are easy to scan and read, and appropriately used to support the information need the user has. Unnecessary graphics only slow the reading and the download time of web-based documentation. Write instructions in imperative form and address the user directly using active sentences.



6. Support for various methods for searching Information

Documentation should support people with different strategies for finding information: some search through the table of contents, some use the index, some browse, and some use searches (in electronic documentation). The index should contain users' own terminology as well as system terms, terms from international standards, and those used by competitors. The layout of documentation should support browsing so that beginnings of new chapters and important warnings and notes are easily picked up.



7. Task orientation

Instructional documentation should be structured around the users' job tasks, that is, tasks that are independent of the tools used. The job tasks remain the same although the tools may change. For example, the job task "baking bread" remains the same although the baker may do it all by hand or using latest state-of-the-art tools. This reduces the need to restructure the documentation when the product is changed. The tasks should be approximately at the same level of granularity throughout the documentation



8. Troubleshooting

The documentation should contain a troubleshooting section giving users guidance for common problem situations and how to analyze rare situations. All documentation related to errors must be easily accessible.



9. Consistency and standards

Users should not have to wonder whether different words, situations, or actions mean the same thing. If the product has several documents, they should be consistent in their structure and the information in different documents should be designed so that no unnecessary overlapping exists. Follow platform conventions when creating the help system. Be sure that the terminology is consistent throughout the documentation suite.



10. Help on using documentation

If the documentation set is large, provide instructions on intended use, and how it is going to be updated (if separate updates are delivered).

[Source: Heuristic Inspections for Documentation – 10 Recommended Documentation Heuristics by by Vesa Purho, Nokia]

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