Yes, I would like to hit something…

…but I would not like to “Hit Share”, despite Jing’s getting started instructions to do so. I would rather hit the writer who composed these instructions, the editor who allowed (missed?) it, and/or whoever took Jing’s really fun, modern style guide a little too far.

I’ve been using Jing for, oh, about 20 minutes now. I’ll attempt to embed the URL of the offending screen cap here. As a lifelong user assistance professional, I of course skipped over anything resembling a user guide or tutorial and just started playing around. As a result, I have yet to discover a lot of what Jing can do, other than host my rants about their help for free on a site they provide. But I’m looking forward to learning more. Are you using Jing?

As far as hitting keys goes, my beloved Visual Thesaurus has published some bullshit heresy about it being OK to use “hit” (or its ugly inbred cousin, “strike”) metaphorically wrt keys. I can’t like that. I have, however, seen it in a couple of different places lately. Is it making a comeback??

Fun: Shipment of Fail

To celebrate finally noticing an important typo on this page, I visited a site I love to waste a few minutes on: shipmentoffail.com. If you’re really, really easily offended, or if your boss/IT department is a douche bag, you should probably save this (occasionally, mildly offensive) site for home. Of course, I just said douche bag, so you’re probably already in trouble or at home.

More on the future (or lack thereof) of tech communications

It sure has been a while since I posted. I got distracted, first by a crazy busy deadline, then by a lovely little vacation out west. I’ll plan another get-together for Atlanta area folks soon…maybe for next week. I’ve heard Thursdays are better for a bunch of folk, so we’ll shoot for that.

In the meantime, I am going to piggy back on a couple of other blogs that have posts related to the future of technical communications. The first one continues to seek an explanation of my favorite topic: games and social media will put tech writers out of business soon. It’s at  http://24by5.com/wordpress/?p=33 Well, OK, the writer doesn’t quite make the connection between “social media” and “death of tech writing” that I do, but he does have some interesting thoughts about why nobody needs help with Second Life.

The other is on Holly Harkness’ blog. I bet there are zero people reading my blog who don’t already read either Holly’s or Mike Hughes’, but I’ll go ahead and link to Holly’s link here. http://dontcallmetina.wordpress.com/2008/05/20/future-doc/

Get together at Taco Mac this Weds

This Wednesday around 5 pm, we’ll have a get-together at the Taco Mac that is across Abernathy from Perimeter Mall (The “Super Target shopping center”). I hope you can make it. There’s no program or agenda – just show up and hang out, network, chit-chat, imbibe as you like.

If you have any questions, put ‘em in the comments or email me at stevens dot martha at gmail dot com.

 

FrameMaker is Truly Magical

Do you love FrameMaker? I do. I love being able to use the paragraph designer to make things look exactly the way I want, every time. I love side heads! I love using as many numbered lists as I want to, without worrying about Word fucking them up (sorry Mom).

And FrameMaker has some special Magic baked in!

How else would it know when you have exactly one hour left until you absolutely have to mail the pdf to the build guy so he can put it on the special CD for the giant prospect?

Since it’s Magic, FrameMaker can tell exactly when it’s time to have some fun by BSOD-ing repeatedly, just because I tried to update a graphic that was imported by reference. A graphic marketing sent me 5 minutes ago…just a little update! No big deal! Just rename and save it and everything will be cool, right?

I forgot about the special FrameMaker Magic that makes life so fun!

The Thumb Generation

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.

The Death of Technical Writing

I’ll be blogging off and on about The Death of Technical Writing, so let me start by explaining the scope I’ll be talking about. I’m mostly talking about traditonal user documentation (publications and online help) for software. This includes enterprise applications, consumer “in the box” applications, web applications, etc.

This doesn’t include writing about how to use physical things, like HVAC systems, toys, etc., although writers for such products had better beware what I’ve always called “The Lego Effect”. Holly Harkness blogged about The Lego Effect using a different example: Ikea instructions. The Lego Effect is the use of pictures for 100% of the documentation. Unless your product can be documented with 100% pictures, writers with physical products should be OK when all the rest of us lose our jobs.

I once had a job documenting a physical product, and here’s why I think such writers are safe: you can physically hurt yourself with a physical product. And I think there may be a relationship between the degree to which you can hurt yourself and the prevalence of The Lego Effect. You can’t hurt yourself too badly with a Lego, but you can blow up a building with a Chemisorption Analyzer, one of the physical products I documented for the high-tech-rednecks* at Micromeritics. Put the wrong combination of chemicals in the analyzer, crank up the heat and pressure, and you’ve constructed a bomb, literally. So I think there’s some decent job security for whoever’s documenting that now. It would be fun to try to do a 100% pictures version of the Micromeritics doc, but I don’t think the lawyers would get behind it.

 So, summing up this introductory post, your job is safe if you write about a physical product that is potentially dangerous. You need to find a new career if you write books or help about a software application. And don’t think you’re going to segue into usability without another degree or certification, either.

 *Interestingly, the wikipedia does not define high-tech redneck in its article by that name. The HTRs at Micromeritics were physics-lovin’, chemisorption-peddlin’, deer/elk/boar shootin’, bow huntin’, grammar debatin’, homemade elk jerky eatin’ GA Tech graduates. Yippee, another chance to edit the wikipedia!

Don’t use “once” if you mean “after” (a Martha-peeve TM)

I think my former employees used to get really pissed off at me when I would remind them of the Martha-peeves ^TM. Maybe they were sick of hearing it, but then again, I continued to see the Martha-peeves in their writing, so I guess they waaannnted me to repeat myself. One that seemed particuarly annoying to them was my insistence that they not use “once” if they meant “after”.

Example:

Once you have copied the license text into the form, click OK. [wrong]

After you copy the license text into the form, click OK. [right]

Scott Abel, The Content Wrangler,already in my favorites list, is speaking tonight at the Atlanta STC Chapter Meeting on “the adoption of controlled vocabularies to help make content less ambiguous and to improve translation accuracy (and make translation less expensive)*” among other things. I’m looking forward to some vindication on the “once” issue, and I hope all my former employees attend. (OTOH, I may find out what crow tastes like )

All in all, for clarity, for controlled vocabulary’s sake, and for the translation advantages noted above, you should always choose the word with the fewest meanings, in cases where synonyms have multiple meanings.

I am again compelled to note that this post doesn’t apply to creative writers, copywriters, etc.

*quote from the Atlanta STC website

UPDATE: Scott gave a wonderful, humorous talk. It was a little more macro-view than I expected, but then again he only had an hour. Overall, I don’t think I’ll be eating crow any time soon I know I have way more readers on my blog than Scott does on his so I’ll mention that he has a really cool sounding social networking thing on his website (see above) for technical communicators to conglomerate and chat. I haven’t seen it yet, but it sounds wonderful and I encourage you to check it out!

NOT!

Remember the scene in Borat where the comedy coach (who knew?) tried to teach Borat about “Not” jokes? I’m getting ready to work with my dev team on “Not” rules. We let users create rules about who should be able to access network assets under various circumstances. In this version, we’ve added the ability to exclude specific users, groups, machines, etc., by checking the “Not” checkbox.

I don’t like it.

For this release, there’s just no time to rethink this feature. It’s a great feature, and one our customers have specifically asked for. I just think the implementation needs to change in the next release.

So I’m brainstorming…how can we do better? My friend (a user experience professional at a former employer of mine) has suggested working the feature around the word “except” instead of “not”.  It’s a good option; I’m just wondering what other approaches might make sense too.

More info: the dev guys seem to think that people who are used to working with firewall rules are down with “Not”. I’m just not entirely sure that’s our target user. What would a VMware power user call it?

Still more info: in our application, you can use the “Not” checkbox to exclude specific users, computers, applications, etc. from policies, thus indicating to the system that attempts by such users, computers, applications, etc. to communicate on the virtual network are not OK.  Note: in the screenshot above, the “Any” option goes away when you choose “Not”. We wouldn’t want to “Not” allow “Any” user to communicate, now would we?

Ideas?

Error: Configuration error device 0

Our company is working very hard to get a feature-complete build done, as we rush along toward our upcoming deadline. I myself need to get a bunch of screenshots into the help, then get the help into the build.

But <name of your preferred higher power, if any> always seems to have a little fun at our expense, doesn’t <he/she/it>? Our virtual infrastructure client (that which controls all the virtual machines on which we access our UI instances) doesn’t like me today. Well, I thought it was just me, but it turns out that everybody in development is getting an error message: Error: Configuration error device 0. And we are unable to access our vms, and therefore, the latest builds.

Nobody knows what device 0 is. Perhaps more information about exactly what the config error is would shed some light, but alas, there’s naught to be found. I’d like either a little more talk, or a little less talk and a lot more action (to paraphrase one of my favorite Elvis songs).

For <higher power>’s sake, people, figure out how to make your product’s error messages helpful! I guess I’ll go clean out my car now…and work on the help file at midnight.