best practices for moving content between documents

I'm actually here to solicit information about moving content between documents in an established documentation set. 

I think the story is pretty common: you've been documenting a product for a number of years - feature XYZ initially had 20 pages of documentation. This grew to 50, then to 100, then added other supporting documents like reference tables. It's time to give this feature its own document.

So how do you handle it? Are there any pitfalls involved with simply moving the feature and describing the move in document release notes? Should you put a pointer where the text used to be: "XYZ has been moved to Document #09828202, section 2."

Honestly, I don't get much user feedback, except when something is explicitly wrong or incomplete. So as much as I can anticipate confusion, I probably won't get any desperate help requests, but I'd like to do this the right way.  How do you handle this situation?

Tools and User Interfaces

Nudged by Tom's post, I have a quick comment on UI awareness.

I find it funny that some software tech writers don't care much about user interfaces and application usability. We should have a keen eye for appreciating and advocating the user's needs. It's not a stretch then to apply these considerations to ourselves!

My cues that people are not paying attention to how they interact with applications can be demonstrated by their browser use. We get to watch others use browsers in all sorts of informal situations. Here are a few behaviors I've noticed that indicate when someone is not attuned to workflow and UI efficiencies; when the question "how can I do this faster or better?" is never asked.

• Using the Bookmarks drop-down menu exclusively - It is tough to imagine that some people haven't noticed the bookmark bar.
  
• One window per webpage - Tabbed browsing was one of the best innovations ever. There have been lots of nice incremental changes, but high praise for this. I still see some users with 12 unique instances of browser windows scattered on their desktop.
  
• Typing "google.com" manually for all searches. It blows my mind to think that some people haven't noticed the search box next to the address box. Excepting that, you would think that users could at least bookmark pages that the visit regularly.
  
• Use of internet explorer - I don't care, and I am not a firefox advocate, but anyone who used IE6 through its darkest days is completely out of touch. 
  

I honestly don't want to sound petty. I believe that GUI-based applications have evolved to a semi-mature level where certain techniques have proven their high worth. When heavy computers users (even if use is only mandated by your job) who should also be attuned to how people use computers don't take advantage of these shortcuts, it shows a lack of a primary skill required for your job (either that or an extreme ability to compartmentalize skills and tasks).

It's like there's a "how can I do it better?" circuit that some people don't have or choose not to develop. If I were hiring, the presence of this facility would be a big hire/no-hire determiner.

Firefox 3 adoption rate and the culture of the Internet

Ars Technica (Which is increasingly showing its bias and has lost some esteem as of late) runs this article entitled 20 million Firefox 3 downloads in a week, ~4% market share. I want to go out on a limb and pontificate on this data.

I believe that not everyone who intends to upgrade soon has had the chance. (I upgraded at home on the second day because FF2 was slow and had that memory problem (and my wife would never restart firefox, resulting in frustration for her). I haven't upgraded my 2nd home machine, nor have I upgraded my work machine.

But lots of people are enthusiastic for FF3, whether for technological reasons, or for general nebulous Internet enthusiasm (the big news of the week). I'll take a step backwards and suggest that those who upgraded make up most of the Cyberculture drivers (i.e., those for whom the Internet plays a part in their lives). So what I'm really getting at is that Internet-people only make up 5-10% of the Internet.

I've noticed in many blogs and articles, tech-writing and otherwise, people make assumptions about users based on what they believe an Internet User is*. But remember, an Internet User is only one who is visible on the Internet, and I believe that only accounts for at most 1 in 10 users. So, my point is for writers/UI designers/etc to be careful to not assume a user's behavior or needs based on 10% or less of the population.

*that is to say: I have 254 entries in my blog roll, I wake up to 1000+ new articles in my RSS reader daily, my pajamas have a special pocket for my iPhone so I can read twitter messages in my sleep; this makes up half of my human interaction and now I know what people and computer users are like

** I am posting this from Safari on windows. I like safari, although its font rendering on XP leaves something to be desired.

the visual society

Do you remember way back when, in grade school, as an excuse for poor performance, students would say "well I'm a visual learner." And then I suppose sometime in the 80s or 90s it became accepted that some people have an easier time understanding concepts if they don't have to pull the meaning out of pure text. I always felt that with the rise of the GUI, we as a society became more and more visually oriented.

Anyway, this website, graphjam, is cute because it indicates how easily we're able to encode pop culture in visual forms. You could probably also say that visual data presentation is so ingrained in our culture that we've reached the point of parody. Interesting to note, often you'll run across a graph where the author either didn't pick up on the subtleties of the saying or lyric, or doesn't quite have a perfect understanding of the visualization technique.

more graph humor and song chart memes

cool tech

OK, here's a simple question:

What is (one or two of) the coolest, most interesting, got-your-blood-pumping, technology or concept you have ever documented?

Two of mine (working on the big bad production network, no not BBN): 

1. Multicast
   
2. Network performance vis a vis jitter, latency, and packet loss.
   

wiki this and that

I'd say that the days I don't visit wikipedia are rare and definitely the outliers. Have you contributed to wikipedia? (I have in 2 minor ways)

My post and question on the role of wikis in Technical Documentation is short. Let me first contrast between wikis and formal documentation:

• Wiki-Generally non-hierarchical collection of documents that can be edited by the wiki's audience.
• Formal Documentation-Rigidly organized collection of documents that can not overtly be edited by the audience.

Without laying out some pseudo formal frame work to elicit responses, here is my question:

The tech writer generally wears 3 hats: Content Manager, Editor, Technical Writer. Are all three of these hatted people cheering for wikis to supersede formal documentation? If not, what is the balance that should be maintained

I ask this as someone who generally acts as a Tech Writer and sometimes Editor, and in general doesn't really like the idea of wikis invading the realm of formal documentation.



*Maybe this three-hatted person is known as a Content Professional, but UGH on that title*

Documentation and Change

Here's an issue that many of us run into (I'd like to think). What happens when you want to change something in your documentation that's not necessarily broken? What’s the best way to handle mere upgrades and nonessential documentation improvements?

I ask this b/c many writers and editors are loath to make changes if something isn't necessarily broken. If a fact is misrepresented or wrong, it's generally not a problem to fix it. But if our evolving experiences can identify a product improvement, it's often a tough sell to make the change.

Things like boilerplate text, layout, formatting, descriptions, and logical flow of a document are all fair game for improvement. I don't claim to get things right the first time. I don't think it's reasonable to expect everyone to get things right initially. It's only after a waiting period and a sufficient amount of reflection that someone can claim to have nailed down the BEST way of doing something; progress is iterative. I believe that journeymen technical writers have a much higher hit rate of near perfection the first time, and I'm approaching that point - but not yet.

The resistance to make changes I believe comes from the fear that you will confuse and disorient the user. This is a fair critique. A second resistance to change is the extra work that comes along with implementing the change - and the need to implement the change everywhere and at once. A lot of work is involved with a proper system-wide change. Third, a change that works somewhere might break something in a remote part of the system. You're really taking a risk by making changes in a system that already is functional. Fourth, you set a bad example and expectation that nothing is set in stone, and anything can be changed at any moment which might lose your reader's trust.

Please reply and add your thoughts on why non-necessary change should be avoided in technical documentation.

I'm planning a follow-up to refute this in a later post, so save your change is good! replies for then.

steel cage job title championship match

Two disclaimers:

1. I acknowledge that these titles are arbitrary.
2. The distinction I describe is my own and my thoughts probably represent the minority.

Less so in recent years because I've had steady, happy employment, but I often agonize over the definitions of technical writer vis-à-vis applying to job postings. Documentation Specialist is probably the second most common job title (which I held in two government positions) which every TW-type job applicant searches. So when one is bored, fretting, and unemployed, trying to sort out the difference between the two is happily time-consuming. I'll add that the HR people who submit job postings probably don't give the difference a second though. But you know, we're writers - so we obsess over definitions.

I don't know if this was the purpose of the blog entry or not, but Collin Turner's discussion of a subject matter expert (SME) has helped me make a sharp distinction between technical writer and documentation specialist.

SME is a term that's thrown around loosely (at least in my experience), but Turner starts with a salient point in that an SME "provides needed content." The SME is the source of the content. The documentation specialist then chaperones the content through the documentation process until a product is published.

In my limited world view, I'll suggest the following difference: While neither the technical writer nor documentation specialist creates the product (computer application, piece of hardware, or process) that must be documented, the technical writer creates and is ultimate responsibility for the content supporting the product. He or she performs the requisite research inside and outside of an organization to identify, collect, and organize this content.

Collin Turner's description acknowledges these internal conflicts, but lays the organizational knowledge arbitration at the SME's feet.

When I am wearing my technical writer hat (which I like to wear most of the time), I am navigating my organization and available resources to identify and collect all the required content. This means obtaining different functional organizations' ideas of a product, resolving their differences, and presenting a unified view.** Secondarily, I need to have confidence that I can identify with the target audience in order to create effective documentation from the raw data which I've gleaned. This is a real world description, not some idealistic cut and paste from engineering and marketing documents, fix the grammar and save as perfect documentation dream.

I generally feel that a good technical writer must become competent enough in the subject he or she is writing about to answer most questions about it. In the SME-documentation specialist system, the DS has a place to ask questions, but isn't ultimately responsible for the content.

The biggest problem that I see is when an SME doesn't have a vested interest in the user and doesn't take the time to understand the user's documentation and learning needs. When the SME is an engineer or scientist, he or she is too busy creating the widget. But this system succeeds when the SME is in marketing and understands that his or her success or failure depends on the customer's success or failure.

**Any good TW knows that his or her understanding of cross-departmental viewpoints somehow is really valuable to the organization. If anyone in upper management realized this too, I think that TW's organizational roles could be elevated.

If I knew then what I know now...

This is 1/10th a test if trackbacks work, but mostly a comment...

Tom asks the age old question, would you keep doing what you're doing, or do something else. Well I sort of intended to be a tech writer from college...

So the funny thing is I don't specifically enjoy writing, but I'm good at it. I realized this in college as an engineering major. Because in those days, putting in hours of required studying wasn't my strong suit, but my passion for techie stuff was, I put these two things (engineering + writing) together and got a writing oriented degree, with the intent of using it in the technology field.

Do most people go into their college studies all idealistic and truly want their career to orient itself around their decided major? I don't know - but I did. Would I like to be a full time engineer now? Heh, I don't know about full time, but it's fun to put down your pencil and pick up a development environment application.

I've flirted with the idea of other vocations: law (but I don't want to deal with lawyers), teaching (but I like working alone), ISD (same as teaching). These are all in the create or communicate sphere, so I don't know if I'm going so far out on a limb as an oceanographer. OH yeah - I'd like to be a green contractor, but that community is so old-boy network around here, the thought of it turns me off.

Would I mind being a TW in 20 years, writing manuals? Maybe not! It's hard to say, but as long as the technology I write about is engaging, there's a good possibility I will be.

extra wide

What kind of display do you have at work and at home? I find these ergonomics fascinating, since your monitor is akin on the wheels on your car or your stereo's speakers; it's the main interface between the machine and what the machine works against.

At home I share 1 13" laptop. The screen a little bit small but fine for its intended purpose. I will say that if you're in the market for a laptop that you will use for more than Office-type or web browsing applications, splurge and get it with a screen that has a decent off-axis viewing angle. We watch a lot of DVDs on the laptop, and it's narrow viewing angle is limiting.

At home I also have a beautiful 21" trinitron CRT display for my desktops. What more can I say, this is what I was pining over 10 years ago. Accurate, bright colors, with detailed resolution. Plus it doesn't have to deal with the ClearView-type font dithering that most LCDs are sensitive to. The only downside is that it sucks about 120 watts of power and is HUGE.

Finally, my work displays. I started with a 19" Viewsonic CRT - Fabulous monitor. Then moved to a 17" LCD, this was a step backwards because of the reduced resolution, and as I recall, going from a curved screen to a flat screen was a little funky on my eyes for the first few days. I also remember that the LCD screen was too bright. This made it a little bit difficult working in a dim environment because the screen was blaring in your face. Next came an upgrade to a 19" LCD. Now we hit the sweet spot! The 19" had a fine amount of resolution (2 documents side by side in Frame), good color accuracy, and showed precise text once I got the hang of Clearview. I was happy.

But wait - so then the paradigm shifts when I got a 24" HUUUGE wide screen LCD display at work. At first I was blown away - our home TV is 19", and this screen feels much larger than my 21" CRT. I'm going to make this long story short:
For the way I work, a widescreen is overkill. I work very linearly, I don't need to see or refer to 5-10 different pieces of information at once. I generally write a document straight through, edit images one at a time. There are few dynamic dependencies. I'll contrast this with when I was coding or designing websites, where you need to refer to several windows of information at once.

The split screen feature in MS word is great for viewing two parts of a document simultaneously, but that's the most I've ever needed. Now I can have 2 frame documents side by side, but at almost 100% for each. This is nice, but unnecessary. Further, there's the potential to have too much visual information, such that it can be distracting.

Do any other TWs out there use wide screen or multiple monitor set ups effectively, for the TWing part of their job? I can see for content management or designing a help system, it could be useful, but for the straight task of writing and editing text, I'm completely unconvinced.

long time

It's been about a year and a half since I've posted here, and the world of tech writing blogs has not grown too much bigger. I still lament that most tech-writing discussion centers on the tools of the trade, rather than the craft of the trade. But maybe this time around I'll have something interesting to chat about.

Thought of the day

Publishing and Technical Writing are two separate fields. The notion of a documentation department probably creates the needed umbrella for the two fields. It is my belief that you probably only have enough time to engage in either of the sides of documentation. Unfortunately, I believe that many corporations push their workers toward wearing both hats.

As an example, I'm on a Framemaker listserv. I'm not sure why I joined exactly, but I've learned a lot. As someone who really loves technical writing, the difference becomes stark when the contributors to the list get all excited about getting Framemaker to make their lives easier - making the publishing aspect of the company's documentation needs accurate and efficient. Personally I'd rather concentrate on writing great docs - I'd publish to a .txt file if need be!

technical+writing technical+writer documentation Framemaker publishing

poor facebook

Disclaimer: I have never viewed or belonged to facebook.com.F or those who know, correct my errors, but facebook is similar to myspace (and livejournal), i.e. a social networking site.

Facebook is getting hammered by a select set of critics charging that they are releasing person information about members. In actually it seems that Facebook has implemented RSS/whatever feeds of each friend-type user's page, such that any subscriber to the feed can easily view (or be alerted?) of page updates. (I think that the feed is placed directly on a user's home page… much like LJ friend’s lists)

Now presumably Facebook, with its .edu bent, attracts a wide range of users, not necessarily the Internet elite. The Internet elite, heralding all things web 2.0, love when you can add technologies on top of each other to make for a more connected and collaborative online world. News feeds are one of these tools. So I find it funny that the implementation of a tool, which in the abstract can only do good, is being resisted so fervently by the rest of us. (OK, i gotta say, I probably fall into the category of Internet elite)

Only speculating, but the real error here is that the developers and product managers at Facebook were probably too personally involved in the web 2.0 scene to step back and think for a second that their user base wasn't.

survey: favorite technical writing task

I have a simple monday morning question to pose to all the technical writers out there:

What is your favorite task or thing about being a tech writer? We take on 1000 roles, and going from idea for a document to a stack of papers (or file) in a user's hand requires many discrete steps. Which is your favorite step?

Tech Tags: technical writing technical writer documentation work fulfillment best+parts

Woo, a pretty cool article entitled "Tech Writing in the Age of Open Source" on reallylinux.com. Overall a good read, and I'd like to comment on a few of Mark Rais's words.

1. The Reader Feedback Loop. I believe that all TWs want user feedback. We want to make our work that much better, and the only way to learn how to improve is to elicit reader feedback. What Rais fails to realize is that in business and non-personally-motivated communities, most users are likely to grumble and move on after experiencing poor documentation. They aren't paid enough to share what they think.

2&3. This is based on the assumption that your organization delivers its documentation primarily via the web. In all of my experience, this has not been the case. Maybe it's different for other people.

4. Lots of points here:

• Timing over perfection. I agree 100%, although Rais fails to realize that if you produce imperfect, technically inaccurate and misleading documents, your company can be held legally libel. OSS escapes this challenge.
• "Although this emphasis on 'exceptional grammatical quality' may be a worthy trait, it is a worthless cause." I could not agree with this more. Good grammar is important, but devote a worthy amount of time to it, please! I think after years in the biz, we learn how to write in a quick, streamlined manner that gets around most grammatical challenges.
• Honestly, TW projects usually lag behind the software development projects by a week or two at most. If this lag can be accepted (which I think it can in any context), I think that the timing issue isn't really so important. I’ve never seen documents lagging behind the software by months…
• I don't know about this active voice nonsense, I really don't. All of my life I was taught that active is stronger than passive, and it certainly makes sense to me. Is Mr. Rais confusing person and voice, when he discusses what a global audience requires? Certainly globalized English is important to know. Does anyone out there have any tips on how to write this way?

technical writing, technical writer, documentation, OSS, linux

hrm

I kind of jumped into Web2.0's blogging scene way too fast and never researched anything. So lets see if something like this, including tags, actually draws traffic to semicolon. :)

Tags: technical writing, technical writer, documentation, engineering, VoIP, framemaker, visio, networking, IP

back in the day

Charlie Brooker doesn't get it. You see his story sounds much like mine, being a part of the burgeoning wave of the Internet’s Geekdom-as-cool that rose from the mid/late-90s through the bubble bursting. But now Mr Brooker seems to feel disconnected from the latest Internet Thing.

Here's what happened: The Internet, as communication medium, is fully part of the fabric of society. The Internet isn't getting there, it isn't new and hip, it is now an institution. A popular site like myspace is now a mass-culture phenomenon. And like everything before it, the younger generations' trends are what's hip.

It's the same thing as his disdain for the term blogsphere. We can safely say that blogs were the domain of the geeky a few years back, but now anyone who wants a voice can participate. The price of admission was knowing the technology. But as the general level of technological aptitude is so much higher than it was 10 years ago, anyone can join in the fun. Thus the blogsphere isn't the geek's domain.

I think it's hard for those who feel they contributed to the rise of the web to be less visible online; the pioneers' strong voices have been drowned out. You used to visit websites and most of them were created by people similar to you, geeky types. But now, with everyone able to publish online, it's like you're walking down a crowded city street.

correction

I'm sure it has happened to you - you've written and released chapters and pages and volumes, and realized that you got it wrong. I don't mean the actual explanations on a page, but let's say - the organization of your document. (I don't think it's just me)

Because we're not the SMEs, or the users, or we're not the experienced user, there's definitely a learning process the TW goes through when absorbing and spitting out information. When you're documenting some really REALLY big system or process, I think it takes a while, hundreds of hours perhaps, to distill all the information you're tasked to document. The only times where I think this isn't the case are when you either aren't documenting an ultra-complex topic, or if you have a brilliant teacher - and come on, most engineers aren't brilliant teachers.

So I pose this question to you, my loyal readers (technorati says my audience is the #1051076th popular blog, so that's a lot of you):

When realizing your information could be better organized, do you change the organization in your documents? Do you think that this will confused your readers or catch them off guard?

I personally have no qualms about changing things around. Computer hardware/software users are used to constant updates of their software, and chasing the new [technologies], so changing documentation (not contradicting yourself) simply follows the paradigm.

Obviously you don't want to make constant, radical changes. And I'll add the caveat that your text should be highly searchable or contain a usable index, so when the user's expectations fail, they can fall back on a solid means of finding what they need. And obviously, major reorganizations should be minimized. If you constantly find yourself doing this, something is wrong.

javascript be gone

Here's my latest gripe based on 3 experiences. It's highly annoying when developers create feature-rich web-based email clients that try to mock MS outlook.

Why does this bother me?

Because in an attempt to create all the UI niceties, the applications are encumbered by A LOT of client-side javascript. Now that's all well and good, but these applications bring my older-than-6-months PCs to a grinding halt!! This is javascript abuse! Granted my computers at home are each about 5 years old (a 1.2 GHz Athlon-based PC, and a 466 MHz G4 mac).

The three examples:

• company's intranet CMS system
• Yahoo! Mail beta
• Windows Live Mail beta (hotmail++ if you will)

These applications are beautiful and provide a great user experience with plenty of immediate and well-thought out visual feedback, but they bring my two home systems to a grinding halt. I'd probably see a performance gain if these email clients were deployed as Java applications.

So I'll leave the web-developers with this: don't abuse javascript, keep in mind that not everyone has a PC built in the past 2 years.

searching...

I have another gripe about desktop applications. Ok, maybe not a gripe, but a feature that would really make me happy:

In Adobe Acrobat especially, I wish you could search for term XXXX, that appears around term YYYY.

What I'm really asking for is that programs such as Acrobat (or Word, or whatever), have some kind of smart indexing. It seems to me that you could wrangle some sort of identifier of vicinity of two search terms. If the two terms you are searching for have a very close vicinity, you score a hit. I wonder if Google has any level of searching that works in that way.

OK
OJ
Oak
Oik
KO
Edit...
Ignore all
Add to dictionary