Difference between revisions of "Information Development"
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===Audience=== | ===Audience=== | ||
Who is our audience? That is the foremost question. Most of our audience are sysadmins, people who are skilled in computer use. but some of the products are available to end users so that documentation needs to be more basic. | Who is our audience? That is the foremost question. Most of our audience are sysadmins, people who are skilled in computer use. but some of the products are available to end users so that documentation needs to be more basic. | ||
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===User Personas=== | ===User Personas=== | ||
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With Secure Messaging Gateway we found that the new profile workbench was a tough concept for people to wrap their heads around. By adding examples they could follow to create or modify their own profiles. | With Secure Messaging Gateway we found that the new profile workbench was a tough concept for people to wrap their heads around. By adding examples they could follow to create or modify their own profiles. | ||
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| + | See also [[Journey Maps]] | ||
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| + | ===Use Plain Language=== | ||
| + | For any user we need to use plain language [https://www.nngroup.com/articles/plain-language-experts/] to get the message across, because most people will not be experts in our software and don't want to be. They just want to get their job done and our products are generally a small part of their job. Making it easy to find what they want to do is vital. | ||
Latest revision as of 15:27, 10 October 2017
Information Development is a new title for a technical writer because we don't just write anymore. We now create textual, visual, audio and video content.
Contents |
[edit] Audience
Who is our audience? That is the foremost question. Most of our audience are sysadmins, people who are skilled in computer use. but some of the products are available to end users so that documentation needs to be more basic.
[edit] User Personas
You can and should create user personas for your documentation. This will add clarity to designing your documents. For example, Agnes, forty-something, sysadmin at a small college, has Retain, Secure Messaging Gateway, and GroupWise. Then there's Conner, twenty-something, paralegal, a Retain user that does e-discovery occasionally at a large corporation.
These users have very different needs, goals and jobs. For the most part, you can assume they are good at what they do, but what our software does is only a small part of their overall job. They only need to use the features of our software occasionally, so they need reminders of how to solve the problem they are facing, whether it is a backup job not working, getting a certain report or finding a particular item.
[edit] Be Task Oriented
When it comes to enterprise software we can spend a lot of time with the developers, who are insulated from the customer, however its the support team that knows what clients are calling in regularly about. Answer those questions in the documentation and that will make support's job easier. You'll also want to give feedback to developers so they can make the software solve the customer's issue more clearly.
What are our users trying to do? Can we give them an example?
With Retain we found that about six months after gaining a new customer we would get a call with them freaking out because the disk was full and everything crashed. It took creating the Retain Design and Best Practices document to describe how to properly design a Retain server and then disk-full and other installation calls drastically reduced.
With Secure Messaging Gateway we found that the new profile workbench was a tough concept for people to wrap their heads around. By adding examples they could follow to create or modify their own profiles.
See also Journey Maps
[edit] Use Plain Language
For any user we need to use plain language [1] to get the message across, because most people will not be experts in our software and don't want to be. They just want to get their job done and our products are generally a small part of their job. Making it easy to find what they want to do is vital.
