Produced by:
in association with:
The Conference for
Software User Assistance
Professionals
Stockholm, Sweden
Featured Session Descriptions
- Keynote: Social Web Strategies for Documentation
- What Kind of Assistance Do Users Really Need?
- Panel: Discussion of Current User Assistance Trends and Technologies
- Optimising the Googleability of Your Content
- The Design of User Assistance on Mobile Enterprise Applications
- Writing for Readers Who Can't Read
- Help Authoring Tool and Localisation Case Study
- The Spork / Platypus Average: Content Strategy at Red Gate Software
- User Assistance Trends
- Climbing the Levels of Collaboration
- Comparison of Current Help Authoring Tools
- Using DITA to Implement Writing Patterns for User Assistance
- Single-sourced Tooltips from DITA XML Content
- The Wonders of SVG
- An Update on DITA Features, Tools, and Best Practices
- Interactive Dynamic Assistance - Engaging Users with the Functions They Want
All conference sessions and workshops are presented in English.
Social Web Strategies for Documentation
For the first time in history, we have social tools and web analytics for our content. If you and your company are in tune with this shift, you want to deliver content in a way that involves your users and opens more collaboration opportunities. But challenges abound. Social media seems overwhelming and a productivity drain. Without knowing how to approach it, social media seems like a hit or miss proposition with large risks. Ideally, you'd like to find your role on the social web and effective placement for your content. In three steps, find the hits and avoid the misses to meet business goals.
You will learn:
- How to listen and monitor conversation on the social web
- How to define a role as a technical writer - instigator or enabler of conversation
- How to align your efforts with business objectives
- Best practices from others who are implementing social web content that is conversational or based on community goals
What Kind of Assistance Do Users Really Need?
We often think we know what our users want from our software documentation and user assistance. Based on the assumption that users prefer step-by-step instructions, our documents are liberally sprinkled with neatly formatted numbered lists. We also carefully describe all the fields and controls that make up our applications. But do we actually understand why users turn to our assistance? What kinds of problems are they having, do they need guiding through an entire procedure, or are they simply seeking a small fragment of information that will help them on their way? Based on findings from research earlier this year, this session reveals the questions that users really ask. It also recommends design patterns and techniques that will most effectively provide users with what they need and enable them to become more productive.
See Sarah Maddox's blog for a report of this presentation, delivered at the 2010 AODC conference in Darwin Australia.
You will learn:
- The most common obstacles that prevent users from being production with software applications
- How the level of previous experience with an application affects the kind of questions asked and the assistance required
- The most useful types of information that user assistance can provide to users
- Recommendations on design strategies for presenting information to users
- What to look for in a third party search engine, and what's currently available
Discussion of Current User Assistance Trends and Technologies
Ankur Jain (RoboHelp Product Manager, Adobe)
Mike Hamilton (VP, Product Management, MadCap Software)
Tim Green (Head of User Support, EC Software)
Dennis Crane (CEO, Indigo Byte Systems)
Martin Petts (Channel Manager Europe, MindTouch)
Chaired by Matthew EllisonThis lively panel session will explore a range of key technology trends and challenges that are facing today's user assistance professionals. Topics covered by the discussion will include user feedback and collaboration, search technologies and techniques, team-based authoring, content management, and the future of Microsoft Help. There will also be an opportunity to put questions to the panel from the audience.
Optimising the Googleability of Your Content
Despite our best efforts at developing user assistance, it is increasingly likely that your users will turn to Google for answers to question about your software. The success Google has in providing quick answers to difficult questions has made it a natural resource for help with software - even if the software provides online help, FAQs, forums, and e-mail support. Since this trend will probably continue, we need to learn how to "embrace the beast". There are a number of things you can do to improve your Googleability with too much time and money. This session will describes how Google indexes information and what you need to do to be visible, how to use search engine optimisation techniques (including the use of sitemaps and metadata), how writing styles affect indexing, and what other search engines you may want to support.
The Design of User Assistance on Mobile Enterprise Applications
Mobile device enterprise applications require user assistance (error messages, alerts, and help) to explain functionality to the user, assist in task completion, and address usage fundamentals such as setup and preferences. This case study discusses how to understand mobile applications users, including the challenges and opportunities of mobile work methods and the devices themselves. It explores how mobile application user assistance delivery is influenced by different usability heuristics and design priorities. For example, mobile applications user assistance must accommodate the mobile contextual design paradigm of a compressed, unpredictable time available for mobile users to act; their varying locations; and their requirements for convenience, relevance, personalization, and so on. The case study describes the use of multiple usability techniques to understand user’s needs and wants (survey, focus groups, structured interviews, usability testing) followed by the development and real user testing of mobile user assistance design patterns and guidelines for use by user assistance designers.
You will learn:
- Key user considerations for user assistance design on mobile enterprise applications
- How using multiple usability techniques (survey, focus group, structured interviews, usability testing) can provide qualitative input to drive the next stage of an informed design process
- How to develop user assistance design patterns and guidelines for mobile applications
- How to test mobile enterprise applications user assistance design patterns and guidelines with users
Writing for Readers Who Can't Read
At conferences last year, Tony Self suggested that a new generation of people entering the workforce will have a limited ability to read anything other than short texts. If he is right, and the future readers of our user assistance can't read as we do, how are we going to write for such an audience? In this session, Tony returns to the subject and proposes techniques that we can adopt to write for readers who cannot read.
The approaches to reach these new readers involve re-thinking the phrases and terms that we use. For example, surveys have shown that typical computer users don't know the difference between a browser and a search engine. New readers sometimes cannot spell the words they want to search for, so we have to cater for this deficiency in the design of our search. One study suggests that our message must be transmitted in 63 words, and we would have to develop new skills to work within such difficult constraints. At a much higher level, we also have to move away from writing content that requires "deep reading", and create content that suits "power browsing". This points towards the inclusion of more multimedia materials, and a move to visual work instructions and tutorials for procedure documentation. The challenges in writing for readers who can't or won't read are many, but these are challenges that we must as some point face up to.
You will learn:
- How the reading abilities and literacy of the audience for our user assistance is changing
- How it is easy to make the wrong assumptions about reader knowledge
- How multimedia and visual instructions are growing in importance
- How new readers want to create as well as consume information
- How we need to design user assistance to suit the method of searching that new readers expect
Help Authoring Tool and Localisation Case Study
This case study explores the journey that Fitness First has taken to change their method of deploying technical documentation from monolithic Word documents to online user help created with MadCap Flare. The introduction of standard software in all the clubs provides a unique challenge for the documentation team to produce valuable user assistance for a youthful, multi-lingual and impatient user base.
You will learn:
- The lessons we learned using MadCap Lingo both to translate internally and to manage translations by an external agency.
- How we use MadCap X-Edit to allow contributions of content from the software design team
- How we included the operations manual along with the software Help
- How we deploy and market the documentation to the users and how we measure its take-up
The Spork / Platypus Average: Content Strategy at Red Gate Software
Content strategy is this year’s buzzword. 170 people from 18 countries came to the Content Strategy Forum in Paris. But what is it all about and what does it have to do with us?
Well, it’s based on doing what a lot of technical communicators have been doing for a long time: delivering content that’s optimised for user and business goals, and making sure it stays that way. But now companies are starting to take notice.
By presenting itself as a revenue centre, not a cost centre, and extending into an organisation’s entire web presence, content strategy is a new opportunity for technical communicators to add significant value to a business.
I'll talk you through how we did this for SQL Tools at Red Gate, how we design, measure, and curate content, our new collaborations with marketing, and give you some pointers for selling content strategy in your organization.
Climbing the Levels of Collaboration
Groups can take action even quicker than before thanks to tools that amplify group communications, such as wikis, blogs, forums, social networks, and instant messaging. There are distinct levels of collaboration that a group can attain and what they accomplish directly correlates to the level of collaboration.
- Information sharing—Finding information as any technical writer does, via email, phone calls, interviews, and so on. A brief collaboration exercise shows the power of information sharing
- Cooperating—A discussion of Agile development techniques to help shape a web application and the online help that accompanies it. Introduces the use of wikis for documentation
- Collaborating—A case study of how a new in-person collaboration method called a Book Sprint is run (with subject matter experts identified and working together to create an information deliverable). FLOSS Manuals' wiki platform serves as an example.
Comparison of Current Help Authoring Tools
Although most of today's tools for authoring user assistance generate similar end-results, the process for creating, managing, and maintaining content varies considerably between them. Choosing a tool with a paradigm that matches your own required workflow is critical — the wrong decision can be extremely costly in terms of wasted time and effort. This session provides you with the information you need to make an informed decision about tool selection. It covers some of the major options including the latest version of Author-it, Doc-To-Help, Flare, Help & Manual, RoboHelp, and WebWorks ePublisher. The session also discusses the various advantages and disadvantages of using a specialist Help Authoring Tool as compared to other solutions such as Wikis and XML-based content management systems.
You will learn:
- Whether a Help Authoring Tool is the most appropriate type of tool for your development environment
- The key criteria that you should consider when selecting a Help Authoring Tool
- An overview of the available tool options
- The workflow of each of the major tools
- The key strengths and weaknesses of each of the options
Using DITA to Implement Writing Patterns for User Assistance
Using the concept of the user experience design patterns and an XML authoring environment, the Oracle Applications User Experience team has brought the concept of the writing pattern to life. Patterns provide high-level guidance to technical writers on the best way to consistently design, organise and write Help topics.
This case study outlines Oracle Applications approach, including the design and implementation process, the research on user requirements, and the usability techniques used for validation. The resulting writing patterns are an easily learned, scalable way for writers to efficiently design and deliver effective user assistance.
You will learn:
- How the concept of writing patterns can be applied to user assistance and how they integrate with an overall product user experience.
- Lessons from the process of developing and refining writing patterns
- How the patterns can be applied directly in an authoring environment
- The benefits of this approach
- Ideas for future use you might like to explore too
User Assistance Trends
Joe Welinske presents an overview of latest trends and key technologies in the field of software user assistance. This provides a valuable update on what's new since last year's conference.
Single-sourced Tooltips from DITA XML Content
Michael Zwecker (LogMeIn, Inc)
We all know that no one looks at the User Guide. So bring the User Guide into the interface (well, at least part of it).
In this session, you will see how content written primarily for a User Guide can be tagged and extracted for reuse as single-sourced tooltips. This approach allows you to deliver information that helps users make decisions without forcing them to open a PDF or Help file. Content is single-sourced, so it costs you little extra other than set-up time and a little extra planning. We'll look at a live implementation and discuss the key issues.
You will learn:
- How to identify content as tooltip text
- Whether you can reuse your content directly from your DITA XML source, and whether you will have to convert
- The challenges of writing material that must work both as a tooltip and as User Guide content
- How minimalist principles (task orientation) apply to this solution
- How to manage localization
The Wonders of SVG
SVG is an XML-based vector graphics format, and offers some great opportunities for technical communication. The text in SVG graphics can be found in search, the images are scaleable, they are well suited to mobile browsers, the text within is easily translatable, and some images can even be automatically generated. SVG is ready for prime-time, with support by many graphics tools, browsers, and authoring tools. DITA and SVG also work well together. In this session, we explore what SVG should mean to technical communicators.
You will learn:
- The basic technical fundamentals of the SVG format
- How SVG graphics can provide benefits to documentation quality
- What tools can be used to create SVG graphics
- How DITA and SVG work together
An Update on DITA Features, Tools, and Best Practices
While DITA adoption is slowly gaining momentum, the DITA standard itself is undergoing a renovation, with DITA 1.2 recently released by the OASIS DITA Technical Committee. DITA tools are becoming more sophisticated, new DITA tools are appearing on the market in abundance, and familiar tools are adding more and more DITA support. As the improvements that the new 1.2 standard allow filter down into authoring and publishing tools, the capability and efficiency of a DITA workflow will become even more attractive. The rise of new document delivery platforms, such as eInk devices, eBooks and iPhones, is also relevant to DITA adoption. Perhaps because DITA is an open standard, and many tools are open source, finding best practices for DITA implementation from the range of approaches is a challenge, and some guidelines can smooth the road. In this session, we will take stock of where the DITA methodology has been, and is going.
You will learn:
- The status of DITA as a practical platform for user assistance
- About the range of DITA authoring, content management and publishing tools
- How Help Authoring Tools are implementing DITA support
- The delivery options for DITA content
- How DITA best practices can streamline a documentation project
- The new major architectural features in the DITA 1.2 standard
- How specialisation and a constrained authoring environment can improve efficiency
Interactive Dynamic Assistance - Engaging Users with the Functions They Want
Whilst content management and authoring are essential to the creation of any technical publication, the benefit an end user can realise is the ultimate aim. This (not too technical!) presentation focuses on how new XML-related developments, such as XML native databases and XQuery, can be used to create more engaging deliverables for end users.
Using relevant examples, Mark shows not only how these new developments provide a more efficient means of delivering content but also how content can be delivered in ways that would otherwise be difficult to achieve. For example, how user documentation, wikis and blogs can relate to each other more effectively.
You will learn:
- What interactive dynamic assistance can mean for your organisation
- How DITA can be delivered dynamically using XQuery and XML databases
- About publishing dynamically and avoiding the standard, static outputs created by the DITA Open Toolkit
