My prediction about the Death of Technical Writing has a physical corollary: “the thumbs of the younger generation have overtaken their fingers as the hand’s most muscled and dexterous digit” according to the Guardian. In Japan and Europe, teens are referred to as The Thumb Generation.
People under 25 grew up using computers and hand-held computerized devices from infancy. Thumb dominance is a physical-world corrolary for the fact that young people also approach computer applications in a fundamentally different way than older people do.
They don’t read User Guides. They don’t use traditional help. They don’t even really need – or like – affordances.
What do they use? That’s the question we, as technical communicators, need to figure out.
I think the answer has a lot to do with the user assistance paradigms found in games. While I was managing teams writing thousands of pages of user doc for moderately complicated UIs, I watched my 10-year-old son sit down and wreak havoc on first-person shootees without consulting any doc or help. I had to ask myself: what are we doing wrong?
We’re not doing anything wrong NOW. Because applications NOW require some tradtitional doc and help. But as the Thumb Generation becomes the Target User for our applications, I believe that both the applications and corresponding User Assistance will evolve to…nothing? No, but we need to start looking now at the user assistance paradigms that the Thumb Generation is using now: that’s what we’ll be creating in the future.
What if your application is run by a game-like controller? WHY NOT?
What if your primary method for communicating with your users is through a blog or forum? WHY NOT?
In the increasingly DITA-dominated world, which seems to seek to homogenize writers’ voices, how do you account for the fact that the vast majority of online user communities – and many blogs – are multi-voice? Writers of such media have varying street cred or authority in both product and domain knowledge. Should we not have the same authority (responsibility) within our products’ user assistance? Why are we anonymous?
I’m starting to study computer game design, not because I want to design games, but because I think today’s games are the key to the user assistance paradigms of tomorrow’s enterprise applications.
