Insights
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Documentation Insights: My Derivation of a Design Thinking Technique
While I can never understate the importance of documentation standards, its inspiration or source is often overlooked. Today, organizations have their own sets of guidelines. So, when my manager asked me to create a set of guidelines for my team, I took to it with the utmost consideration. I realized later that the care I… Continue reading
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Three Tips to Internationalize Content
There are also times when you generally refer to things from your own culture and expect others to know about it – unless you tell them about it. I’ve celebrated Ganesh Chaturthi ever since I was a child. But, to hear that this is a festival to celebrate the birth of the elephant-headed good was… Continue reading
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Why Isn’t a “Help” Helpful Enough?
For the most part of their exploring the product, the users are busy finding answers to their how-does-this-damned-thing-works questions. Why is it still that we are unable to design formats that can make the users’ troubleshooting pursuits easy? Continue reading
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Don’t Fix What Isn’t Broken!
We all learn. And, here’s the post on one such thing I learned, recently. For one of the projects I worked before I switched jobs last week, I was the only tech-comm contributor who held the dual role of preparing technical content as well as marketing collateral for the flagship product. Until that time, I thought that technical Continue reading
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Once upon a Time in Technical Writing
Stories are the commonest way the ethics, histories, information, insights, and knowledge have passed on to the younger generations. Through its multiple forms, storytelling focuses on building touch points to get messages across: Something that we too do as technical writers. I try to find the threads that storytelling shares with technical writing. And, here’s Continue reading
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Do you create video reviews on newer technologies, too?
Time and again I get to answer the question about what I do for a living. Yes, it does get irritating at times. But, mostly I love answering such questions. This time around, it was a marriage party and the questions were from the father of a curious teenager. “So, I heard you are a Continue reading
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Connect Those Pesky Dots
“For god sake, once, just once, connect those pesky dots. Can’t you see that I can’t understand anything? Even a word?” That’s what I often say when I look at bad write-ups. I just can’t connect those pesky dots to see what the story is. But, am I the only one who rubbishes write-ups that Continue reading
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The Next Big Thing: Workshop
Next month, I am conducting a couple of workshops at the STC India Annual Conference, in Pune. I like to talk about technical communication. And, at the conference, I’ll meet a lot of those would like to talk to me about this faculty of knowledge. Also, information design, as a topic, has always fascinated me. Continue reading
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Heuristics in Information Design: So that you get only what you need
Heuristics, unlike what most of us know, is not ONLY about the trial-and-error way of doing things. Heuristics are those basic guidelines that mostly cover the generic application of common sense. And, I don’t see a better faculty than technical communication to apply this technique. Here’s what I have to share. Continue reading
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Three Tips for Effective Localization
In this post, I take a closer look at the localization project in which my team and I assisted. I take cues from this project, and the similar ones that I have done previously, to discuss the top-three points for localization. This post is special to me, because it has helped me unfold those chapters Continue reading
The Wordsmith 