quality parameters
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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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What questions do you ask to SMEs to begin with technical documentation?
During a recent online conversation, someone requested for a list of questions I would typically ask to a subject matter expert (SME) to prepare technical documentation for a topic. Of course, the parameters may vary, but there is still a list of questions that apply across all sizes or complexities of projects. In this post, I Continue reading
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And that’s why I’d go for a mirrorless camera!
For the last couple of years, I have yearned for a camera. And, as usual, my tech-writer’s brain told me to begin researching, reading, and observing on the topic before I made purchases. So, over the years, I have developed an opinion. But first, some points for the premise: I am an amateur photographer. That 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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Trends in Technical Communication
In response to a reader’s question, I explore the impact of soft skills on the trends in technical communication. But, do the skills and trends have anything in common? Can the soft skills affect trends? If yes, how? Well, there are a lot of questions. And, I attempt to solve some of them in this Continue reading
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Reduce: To Improve
This post is about progressive reduction, which is what I’ve recently read about. From what I have gleaned, progressive reduction is about those gradual changes (mostly reduction) in the UI elements that relate to your time-lapsed incremental cognition of a product. In other words, progressive reduction is in continuously adapting the UI elements of your Continue reading
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FAQs 2.0
This article focuses on the pin-pointedly accurate ad hoc solution – in the form of a FAQ – that saved the day for our customers. This document, which I’ve called FAQs 2.0, is a combination of troubleshooting information, FAQs and configuration settings. Read the full post here. Note: The stub contains link for the article, Continue reading
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My must-refer list of books.
This is one post, which every technical communicator has in their blog: A list of the must-have, must-read, and must-refer books in technical communication. I see that the list of books, which is although basic, will soon have some more names. But, I know you will like this one! Note: This stub contains links for Continue reading
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Key to Quality Documentation
In this post, I’ve combined my understanding of the topics of rhetoric and minimalism to create two basic, understandable parts of the purpose of documentation: mean what you say and say what you mean. I’ve also talked about how the use of these two parts can improve the effectiveness in documentation. Note: This stub contains Continue reading
The Wordsmith 