atw: Re: Reliance on super-users, manuals, etc [WAS: Time for another debate?]

Hi Geoffrey



I’m not surprised that you’ve had a negative experience, or ten.  I would be
interested to know what information you were after, purely as an experiment
to see if I’m doing something different in the way that I search.   Let me
know if you can remember the nature of your watermark problem.



It’s early days, but a body of user support is definitely evolving.  Companies
are onto the trend, don’t mind at all, and will possibly, over time, view
technical writing as an area worthy of cost cutting.   I don’t believe it
will do away with initial manuals or online help tools, if for no other
reason than legal and/or moral obligations to the market.   Beyond that, I
don’t think they’ll be knocking themselves out to update or expand initial
offerings, but they don’t now, do they?  The type of user information being
created on the Internet is filling an existing void.  There has never been a
fungible offering from organizations.



I have not worked in any organisation where wikis have taken hold in any
meaningful sense, nor blogs.  As I understand it, wikis and blogs are
working vigorously well as information sharing and problem solving mediums
in leader companies like MS and Google.  In other, more pedestrian,
organisations getting these things set up doesn’t seem to be a hurdle.  It
fails at the level of gaining ongoing attention and having material of
interest and value to people’s work.  Lame Q&A content isn’t sexy enough to
engage an audience or to create active participants.   A passive wiki or
passive blog is a rather pointless thing.   I don’t see this changing in a
hurry.  Perhaps it’s because people at work habitually go to the Internet
for information, rather than in-house resources?



“Is it because our traditional delivery mechanisms have been superseded?”



Yes, largely correct.



“Or is it because the usability and spread of the content in our traditional
offerings has been continually corroded by a bean-counter approach to
meeting user needs.”



As a survey question, that’s loaded with bias.  Tech writers are often
poorly paid, so the “bean counters” probably have very little concern over a
gaggle of tech writers dropping by for a few months to write material that
no one uses.  So long as all the enablement and rollout tick boxes have been
ticked, everyone is happy to pay the price for a clean audit or post
implementation review.


If the usability and content of traditional offerings has been corroded (and
I don’t know if that’s true), that’s a deterioration in delivery, not the
fault of a budget.   Whether writing two pages or 200, blaming a lack of
dollars for doing a poor job of providing usable and appropriate content is
a major professional cop out.


Is it that tech writers are so busy getting themselves in a knot over tools
that they spend little time researching, analysing, synthesising and
writing?  (Confession:  I write, period.  If something needs to be published
in some beaut little format, someone else – someone who neither knows the
business nor can write - is paid to do that.  It's a nice delineation of
responsibilities, and doesn't waste my time fluffing about with tools.  I
provide content.)



WRT - reliance on superusers:  I make zero assumption about their
communication skills or technical writing abilities.  Most of them possess
neither in abundance, and why should they?  I’ve yet to meet a technical
writer who can roll out cable or configure a mainframe, doesn’t stop them
from trying to write about such things (alas) and  no one thinks the lesser
of them for their deficit of competencies.



For my purposes, I’d much rather a grammatically incorrect intelligible
instruction than a seemingly well constructed set of written directions that
are wrong, or just don’t work.  Tech writers often don’t know anything about
the business, so manuals and help tools not infrequently reflect a “in
theory it will work if you do these things…”.  In practice useless!



On the other hand, the bumbling person who can tell me in sparse, basic  -
or even barely intelligible - English,what works in practice, is always
infinitely more useful to me than the leaden, sterile hand of tech writing.




In other words, I don’t agree for one second that only tech writers know how
to communicate.  Some of them don’t even know how to write.


(Yes, yes – being overly provocative.  Just get awfully tied of cleaning up
the mess other people make, or having material presented to me as final,
when it’s clearly a half-arsed first draft, and not a very good one at that.
Perhaps someone could answer for me how it came to be that there are so many
people who pride themselves on their writing skills who are of the genuine
believe that their first hastily tossed together draft is actually their
final draft?)

C


On Wed, May 27, 2009 at 9:05 AM, Geoffrey Marnell
<geoffrey@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx>wrote:

>  Caz mentioned the way of help in the future might well be through the
> advice of super-users. That's worked for me on occasion ... but not always.
> I recently asked MS Word's help facility a simple question (to do
> with watermarks). Instead of Microsoft offering the answer, I was directed
> to a user forum. And what did I get? Contradictory answers (and let's not
> mention the almost unintelligible language). An hour wasted trying both
> so-called answers, and I gave up in frustration and relied instead on the
> experimentation of willing colleagues. Another hour or so wasted before the
> solution took shape. Multiply that cumulative waste by the many users who
> have no doubt asked the same question and the result would well and truly
> out-balance the effort a Microsoft technical writer would have taken to add
> the answer to the MS online help.
>
> Reliance on super-users sounds great, but there are two
> important assumptions involved: that they really are super-users, and that
> they know how to communicate their knowledge. Or put it another way, it
> assumes that they are technical writers ;-) Long  live the technical writer.
>
> Which brings me back to a point I raised on this list a few months back: if
> users are not using our traditional offerings (online help, user guides,
> etc) but are seeking alternatives in wikis, user forums and the like, is it
> because our traditional delivery mechanisms have been superseded? Or is it
> because the usability and spread of the content in our traditional offerings
> has been continually corroded by a bean-counter approach to meeting user
> needs.
>
> It may once again be time to remind industry of the value of our
> profession.
>
>
> Geoffrey Marnell
> Principal Consultant
> Abelard Consulting Pty Ltd
> T: +61 3 9596 3456
> F: +61 3 9596 3625
> W: www.abelard.com.au
>
>
>  ------------------------------
>

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