More Speculation on the Merging of the Help and Mobile Silos

By Neil Perlin | Fellow

We’ve heard for years that “mobile” is the future, that smartphones and tablets outsell PCs and laptops, and that tablets will displace PCs and laptops at work. With these predictions in mind, I was struck by an eclectic mix of articles that I found recently. These articles led to this column on the forthcoming merge of mobile and tech comm, specifically online help, and a discussion of some factors driving that merge.

One article is “Infographic: The Post-PC Era Is Here” (www.fiercecontent management.com/story/infographic-post-pc-era-here/2013-03-27). The second, in a neat counterpoint, is “Tablets Still Cannot Replace Laptop, Desktop PCs: 10 Reasons Why” (www.eweek.com/mobile/tablets-still-cannot-replace-laptop-desktop-pcs-10-reasons-why). The third is “The Hemi Q&A: Dennis Crowley Interview” (Crowley founded Foursquare) in the April issue of United Airlines’ Hemispheres (www.hemispheresmagazine.com).

What struck me about the “Infographic” article were the statistics and predictions regarding the spread of mobile devices. For example, one statistic noted that a billion cell phones were sold in the last 16 years, with the next billion expected to be sold in the next two. And there was an estimate from Google that by 2013 more people will use mobile devices than desktop PCs to go online. The problem with such predictions is that they’re useless unless you know who created them, how, and why. After years of watching “next big things” hyped on the Web, you learn to take any predictions and statistics with a grain of salt. And yet, anecdotally, mobile seems hot. Should tech comm be looking at mobile or are mobile and online help separate silos?

Many people in tech comm say no when I ask if their clients are looking at mobile. Yet when I ask clients the same question, the answer is yes about half the time. Mobile devices may not replace desktop and laptop PCs, as the second article noted (and this one, “Why I’m sticking with a laptop for work,” www.fiercecio.com/techwatch/story/why-im-sticking-laptop-work/2013-02-08). Yet collapsible, roll-up, and even virtual keyboards (www.brookstone.com/laser-projection-virtual-keyboard) have been around for years. And some of the most interesting, dynamic, and cool new developments are on the mobile side. For example:

• Samsung has displaced Apple as the world’s largest smartphone maker according an IDC survey (www.businessweek.com/articles/2013-03-28/how-samsung-became-the-worlds-no-dot-1-smartphone-maker). Apple’s demise is commonly forecast, such as in the article, “Is the iPhone becoming the new BlackBerry?” at www.mobilemarketer.com/cms/news/manufacturers/15149.html. I don’t see that happening, but such speculations echo the 1980s, when Compaq created the first true IBM-compatible PC and ended IBM’s monopoly of the PC hardware business.
• The word mobile connotes handheld devices, but that should change with Google’s release of Glass (http://support.google.com/glass/answer/3064128?hl=en&ref_topic=3063354) and Apple perhaps reinventing the wristwatch (www.forbes.com/sites/darcytravlos/2013/03/31/apples-rumored-iwatch-and-why-it-matters/).
• Geolocation in a smartphone is powerful and already part of our culture. For example, you may see a Facebook post that your friend Neil Perlin is at the Taco Rey Taco Shop in San Diego. What you’re seeing is from Foursquare (https://foursquare.com). It lets users broadcast their location, partly as a game, partly to signal nearby friends that “I’m here, anyone else around?”, and partly as a way to collect location data to help companies sell to you when you’re in a certain area, such as down the street from Joe’s BBQ.
• As useful, or annoying, as geolocation sounds, “geofencing” (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geo-fence) offers still more power by letting developers define regions within which certain activities can occur, such as a neighborhood or store location (for some examples, see Urban Airship (http://urbanairship.com/products/location-based-mobile-marketing#geofences).

These technologies aren’t guaranteed to succeed. For example:

• Foursquare sounds promising but was in financial trouble until a recent $41 million investment bought it time (www.businessweek.com/articles/2013-04-11/foursquare-gets-41-million-investment-time-to-grow). It may still fail if it can’t increase revenue.
• Geofencing may annoy people who just don’t want to be tracked. (Survey the smartphone users in your audience to see how many of them allow Google Maps to track their current location.)
• As an example out of the past, the Osborne 1, released in 1981, created the concept of mobile computing (even though it was the size and weight of a portable sewing machine). Yet just a few years later Osborne was gone, replaced with more powerful entries like the Compaq Portable (www.obsoletecomputermuseum.org/compaq/).

All these developments sound interesting and fun, but how might they affect tech comm?

Possible Effects on Tech Comm

Until recently, help and mobile worlds were separate worlds. (So were the help and HTML worlds until 1997, so silo merging is rare but not unusual.) But the ability to generate browser-based outputs from our help authoring tools (HATs), like the WebHelp output from Flare and RoboHelp, effectively meant we’re creating output that could run on mobile devices, even if that output wasn’t optimized for mobile.

The HATs continue to add features that support additional types of mobile—the ePub and mobi ebook formats, mobile-optimized WebHelp like Flare’s WebHelp Mobile, and RoboHelp’s support for native iPhone and Android apps. (The results won’t look like Angry Birds but they will be apps.) In other words, the mobile and online help/doc worlds are starting to merge. Based on that, here are some predictions:

• Single sourcing will become increasingly complex as we need to be able to output to anything. Yet, paradoxically, some of these outputs may be simpler than they sound. For example, Google Glass’s specs indicate a display equal to a 25” screen eight feet away. In that case, we won’t have the formatting problems of trying to squeeze a full-sized screen’s worth of content into the tiny screen of an iPhone.
• Screen design will become increasingly complex if we have to take screen rotation into account.
• If our HATs output native apps, we may have to start considering geofencing when planning the online doc/help. Geofencing doesn’t seem to apply to tech comm but that may just be because we haven’t had that capability and have thus never thought to do it. Now we might.
• Similarly, we may be able to create online help/doc that can respond to external conditions. For example, imagine an aircraft servicing manual that detects the temperature and automatically changes the instructions depending on whether the temperature is above or below freezing.
• Project spec’ing and management will become crucial. “Winging it” won’t even be an option.

Summary

I expect it to be several years before these changes significantly affect tech comm. But the HAT features and mobile components are available or emerging now, as are homebrew processes for feeding content from a HAT to certain types of app databases. That transition will open new jobs and new lines of work, just as online help and the Web did years ago and changed the face of tech comm. Time to start thinking about making that transition.

Neil Perlin (nperlin@nperlin.cnc.net) is an internationally known consultant, strategist, trainer, and developer for online content in all forms from traditional online help to mobile. To this, he brings 34 years of experience in tech comm and 28 in online formats and tools past, present, and future (having represented STC to the W3C). Neil is Madcap Certified for Flare and Mimic, Adobe Certified for RoboHelp, and Viziapps Certified for the Viziapps Studio mobile app development platform. He provides these services through his company, Hyper/Word Services (www.hyperword.com). He is an STC Fellow and the founder and manager of the Bleeding Edge stem at the STC summit.