By Samartha Vashishtha
The Community Help framework embodies an understanding of how Web 2.0 users access technical communication. It recognizes the fact that user needs are best served by amalgamating traditional Help deliverables with third-party user assistance resources and presenting them together. Let's examine this framework closely and look at how Adobe implements it to deliver the next-generation Help experience to a diverse user base.
Understanding Community Help
The emergence of Web 2.0 has expanded the scope of the technical communication profession all over the world. An ever-growing number of technical communicators are now actively blogging and using social media to engage with customers and readers. The hundreds of technical communicators registering their presence on Twitter are a fair indication of how the profession is embracing change.
While many technical communicators appreciate the dimensions that Web 2.0 is adding to their role, few realize that it is changing the very definition of technical communication and how it is perceived by users. Technical communication throughout the 1990s and much of the present decade has been focused on “core” Help deliverables that are typically shipped as part of the product DVD and are closely aligned with product release milestones. Such deliverables include user's guides, online Help in formats like FlashHelp and WebHelp, knowledge base articles, release notes, and so on.
In the years to come, technical communication will essentially be Community Help—a continually evolving amalgam of core Help content and the best community-created user assistance content available across the Web. Also, the boundary between core Help and community content will only blur as we move along. Core Help content will hyperlink, dynamically and statically, to community content and incorporate the best community content in line with due attribution.
Figure 1: Understanding Community Help
Sources for community content
The community content for a product may come from several sources, such as:
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Product-centric websites
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Blogs by users and product experts
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Third-party and company-owned forums
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Product trainers and consultants
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Book and video publishers
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Industry and peer-reviewed journals
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Social media channels, such as Facebook and Twitter
Forms of Community Content
Community contributions to content can take several forms, such as:
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Comments for improving the content
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Pointers to documentation issues and bugs
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Tips and articles
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Videos and demonstrations of product workflows and features
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Real-world usage examples that enrich product documentation
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Code samples for programmer's documentation
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Tutorials, especially for advanced workflows
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Book excerpts
A desirable ingredient of Community Help is to allow users to comment on the core Help content created by technical communicators. True to the Web 2.0 spirit, users should be able to rate, suggest improvements, and propose additions to the content on the fly and without much effort. In fact, for many organizations, content improvements in response to direct user comments far outnumber content improvements through other community sources.
Later in this article we will focus on Adobe's Community Help implementation and how it creatively harnesses many Web 2.0 technologies.
A Business Case for Community Help
Before analyzing how Community Help is an appropriate model for next-generation technical communication, let's quickly glance at the following pillars of Web 2.0 identified by Karen A. Coombs:
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User as contributor
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Remixable content
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Rich user experience
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Radical decentralization
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Small pieces loosely joined
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Perpetual beta
From a technical communication perspective, I would add a seventh pillar that helps authors prioritize content that is important from a user perspective.
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Analytics
The Community Help framework takes these seven pillars into account and leverages Web 2.0 technologies for technical communication.
Making Sense of Trends
Technical communicators have often realized that readers turn to documentation only when they are trying to resolve an issue. Further, the application of Web analytics to user assistance resources has uncovered the following trends:
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The core Help for a product ought to be, but is not always, the primary user-assistance resource. Users often search the Web for answers before reading product documentation. In many cases, users land at topics in the core Help through popular search engines.
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Consistent with the 80–20 rule, the bulk of user “hits” are directed to a small subset of Help topics. Thus, to ensure greater customer satisfaction (the dreaded CSAT!), technical communicators should focus on enriching these Help topics rather than the whole “book.”
Taking cognizance of these trends, Community Help remixes core Help and relevant community content and empowers users to quickly find solutions to their problems (rich user experience). Unlike traditional documentation sets, it lays emphasis on the search-optimization of content rather than the book-based writing model. That is a fundamental shift that all technical communicators and learning organizations are negotiating right now. While bulky printed manuals have been on their way out for some time now, technical communicators are focusing more on keywords, metadata, modularity of content, and search optimization techniques.
Great Expectations
Community Help also appropriately addresses the following challenges that technical communication professionals and teams have faced over the years:
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We live in times of demanding users and doing “more with less.” By leveraging community expertise in documentation, Community Help delivers a richer documentation experience without increasing costs.
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Product schedules often do not permit enough time for high-quality documentation. The best time to write documentation is a few weeks from the end of the beta milestone (when the software is turning stable) to a few weeks before the ship date. This window of time is often too short for writing quality documentation that includes great examples, tutorials, tips, and best practices. Since this window is the crunch time for engineering teams as well, documentation reviews may not always get the same attention as critical code bugs. By letting technical communicators push year-round updates and improvements, especially post-ship, Community Help delivers a more complete user assistance experience.
What Community Help Means for Technical Communicators
For technical communicators, Community Help signifies compulsory evolution from the traditional technical writer role. The technical communicator of the future will be a writer/editor/community manager rather than just a writer of core Help content. Technical communicators will also shoulder the responsibility of building and nurturing communities, both inside their organizations and beyond.
Additionally, technical communicators will need to push continual updates to documentation (known as perpetual beta) rather than staying tied to the product release milestones. Figuring out what content must form a part of core Help and what can be published using alternate routes, such as blogs, may become a useful skill to master. Technical communicators will also need strong interpersonal skills to reach out to community members, address their prejudices, and encourage them to contribute in their areas of strength.
As the scope of the technical communication profession changes, the parameters for measuring its success must change as well. Here are a few performance indicators that technical communicators may be evaluated against in the near future:
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Effective collaboration with customer-facing groups, such as the customer-support organization or evangelists, to identify key Help topics and prioritize documentation updates
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Search-optimization of content—effective keywords, modularity of topics, and findability (the ease with which users can find the content they're looking for)
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Number and quality of internal and external community contributors recruited and trained
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Fairness in assessing and rewarding quality community contributions
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Quality and depth of community contributions facilitated
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Promptness in addressing user comments on Help topics
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Ability to harness Web 2.0 channels, such as social media websites, to build and nurture communities
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Relationships with key moderators and the overall “health” of the content ecosystem for the product of responsibility
What Community Help Means for Users
A mature implementation of the Community Help framework gives readers one-point access to all relevant user assistance content available on the Web.
Traditional core Help content often leans more toward the needs of new and intermediate users than power users. Community Help provides an ecosystem where power users can come together and contribute content that benefits other users.
For trainers and product professionals, Community Help promises greater visibility for the good content that they produce in the course of everyday work. Such professionals are also inherently equipped to lead and help shape product communities.
Community Help and the Lone Writer
Technical communicators working as the lone writer in an organization often race against time to meet competing requirements from different teams and individuals. There is, at best, a hazy understanding of the technical communication profession in such organizations, with the writer contributing in several other capacities.
For such technical communicators, Community Help presents the perfect opportunity to be effective despite minimal available resources. In fact, in many cases, Community Help may be the only way in which technical communicators can ensure the completeness of key content that is critical for the customers' success.
The easiest starting points in engaging the community could be maintaining a blog and harnessing social media channels. Technical communicators can blog regularly to publish tips, tricks, and addenda to core Help, hyperlinking liberally to blogs by customers and product experts. Social media websites can be harnessed as platforms for contacting community members and getting them onboard. Once these members have been identified, technical communicators can solicit their feedback on key Help topics.
Technical communicators can also go the extra mile and persuade their organization to enable com-
menting on core Help content. Here are a few ideas worth exploring:
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If you'll solicit feedback only from users within your organization's firewall, you can use RoboHelp to publish your Help content in the Adobe AIR Help format. User comments will be saved to a shared storage location. Peter Grainge, www.grainge.org/pages/authoring/air/air.htm, discusses how you can create AIR Help using RoboHelp.
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Wikis are an effective way to enable user feedback and contributions. You may want to evaluate free wiki solutions such as JSPWiki or some proprietary solution for your organization's needs.
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You may want to develop a simple, possibly AJAX-based, commenting system in-house. Programming support will likely be required to implement such a system.
Adobe Community Help: A Case Study
The Community Help initiative at Adobe is the culmination of several years of research and optimization efforts. Before we look at its intricacies, let's understand the backdrop against which it was conceptualized and developed.
Adobe caters to a user base that is creative, articulate, and passionate about the products it uses. Adobe's customers come from all over the world and have equally diverse linguistic backgrounds. The Help content for many of Adobe's products is, thus, localized into 30+ languages. This Help content, in turn, serves users with differing levels of expertise:
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Casual users
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Students
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Power users
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Professionals
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Trainers
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Enterprise customers
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Developers
Adobe's solid grounding in information management and architecture is also worth a mention. For more than two decades now, Adobe has been at the forefront of the publishing world, helping shape the technologies that have facilitated today's push-button publishing revolution. This rich experience has helped Adobe understand users' information requirements and how to fulfill them optimally.
See http://community.adobe.com/help/about.html for a detailed introduction to Adobe Community Help.
Figure 2: A simplified view of Adobe Community Help
Methodology
Adobe's core English Help content, together with its localized versions, is open to user commenting and rating. These comments are moderated by Adobe employees (internal moderators) as well as external moderators working across the languages that the content is available in.
User comments can vary widely in their scope and importance. While some user comments may simply be pointers to minor content bugs, other comments provide substantial content, examples, or sample code adding significant value. Sometimes, moderators even solicit feedback from community experts on key Help topics in their areas of interest.
Besides direct user comments, moderators keenly follow the blogosphere, forums, and social media channels to source great community contributions. In many cases, moderators themselves are recognized product experts and distinguished bloggers. Adobe also runs active public and limited pre-release programs for many of its products. Feedback from pre-release forums is often a good source of quality Community Help contributions.
The best community content for a product is showcased on its Help and Support page, updated at regular intervals. Top Contributors and Tutorials and Learning (see items marked in red boxes on Figure 3) are two of the sections on the Help and Support page that acknowledge great community contributions.
Figure 3: The Photoshop Help and Support page
Tools
Adobe has developed several tools that enable users to quickly search across and contribute to the Community Help for their favorite products.
Community Help Search: Users can choose to search All Community Content or Only Adobe Content (see Figure 4 and http://community.adobe.com/help/search.html). While All Community Content lets users search across all Community Help content, they can use Only Adobe Content to search just core Help content.
Figure 4: Community Help Search
Search is a central technology in the Adobe Community Help framework that plays a role beyond its primary purpose of being a navigation aid. It helps aggregate the varied range of content in the community ecosystem and present it through a user interface (UI) metaphor that is easy and intuitive for the user to understand. Watch the video at www.youtube.com/watch?v=tl1_YK-Jcwo to better understand the Adobe Community Help search implementation.
Community Help Client: The Community Help Client (CHC) is a search-centric Adobe AIR application that lets users receive continual updates to the Community Help content for their favorite products. They can also comment on, rate, and contribute to Community Help content from within the CHC. An important benefit of the CHC is that it lets Adobe technical communicators push year-round updates to Help content.
Creative Suite 5, Adobe's flagship product for creative professionals, ships with the CHC. To download the latest version of the CHC, visit www.adobe.com/support/chc/. Figure 5 is a snapshot of the CHC displaying Adobe Illustrator Community Help content.
Figure 5: Community Help Client (CHC) in Adobe Illustrator CS5
Community Publishing System: The Community Publishing System is an AIR-based application that lets readers contribute tips, tutorials, and articles to Community Help. Reader contributions are moderated and edited before they become part of the Adobe Knowledge Base. You can download the CPS from www.adobeopenoptions.com/community/publishing/download.html.
Grading Community Contributions
Moderators evaluate the quality of community contributions and award Community Help points. These points help identify leaders within product communities and reward them with greater visibility. The most prolific Community Help contributors are also acknowledged on the product H&S page.
The Community Help grading and reward philosophy is consistent with the principals of building thriving Web 2.0 communities in which user reputation and respect play pivotal roles.
Priority Updates to Key Help Content
Earlier in this article, we discussed the importance of identifying Help content from an end-user perspective. Adobe technical communicators work closely with customer-facing groups to improve key Help topics and technical articles that generate user queries and support cases. Reader traffic details for Help content and product usage statistics are taken into account as well to identify key content affecting a large number of users.
Additionally, technical communicators monitor Help content that readers have rated as unsatisfactory and update it on priority, often in collaboration with the community. These community-driven updates are continual and not tied to a product release milestone.
Such content updates are also facilitated by the Adobe Community Help Client, which makes pushing live incremental improvements to Help content technically feasible.
Results
The Adobe Community Help initiative has yielded astounding results. The following statistics speak for themselves:
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More than 150 external moderators in 30+ languages.
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60,000+ comments on Help content.
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Thousands of core Help updates in response to user comments. More than 2,000 core Help updates were made for Creative Suite 4 alone.
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Many critical Help updates after community review and in close collaboration with the community. See http://j.mp/cJ5dOa for an example.
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Scores of thriving blogs by Adobe technical communicators, engineering teams, and evangelists.
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Several active social media accounts engaging customers and users.
Summary
For most part, Community Help is the natural outcome of a connected, shrinking world. Technical communicators at several organizations, including Adobe, are embracing the following realities:
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Community content and Help content can be indistinguishable. Community content should complement core Help as much as possible.
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Technical communicators must prioritize updates to content that is important from a reader perspective.
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Technical communication is all about search-optimization now rather than the book-based writing model.
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Blogging and social networking are becoming essential technical communication skills.
In the years to come, an increasing number of technical communication professionals, if not all, will realize the need to first evangelize and then adopt the Community Help framework at their workplaces. After all, once things change, they never quite return to how they were.
Samartha Vashishtha (samartha@adobe.com) works on the learning resources team at Adobe Systems, India. He is also a bilingual poet, writing in English and Hindi, and an intermittent technology journalist. He blogs about all things Adobe at http://blogs.adobe.com/samartha. Follow him on Twitter @samarthav.
