Houston, we have a problem. And it’s a big one in need of action. Right now!
Technical communication as a discipline needs to be overhauled. Not completely, but in my opinion a good makeover is in order. Our old ideas about who we are—and what we do—are outdated. It’s time for us to adjust to the world around us and start creating content of value to our customers. And that means we’re going to need a few new tricks in our bag.
When I say tricks, I don’t mean software, although chances are the software you’re using today hasn’t been optimized for the communication channels your customers prefer. When I say tricks, I mean the amazing things we do when we leverage the power of methods and tools. For example, single sourcing is a method that helped us over the years to accomplish a very cool trick—producing multiple deliverables from a single source. Not only was that a cool trick, but it was also a very useful one that I believe can help us understand the changes many of us must make to future-proof our careers.
Read Between the Lines
Most of the content we’ve been wrangling into new deliverables has been based on the printed book paradigm. Over the past two decades, when we needed a set of books that was slightly different, we’d reach into our bag o’ tricks and, with the help of desktop publishing tools with advanced functionality, we would mix-and-match chapters and sections of our books and recombine them into new deliverables. It was a lot faster than previous methods and it was a pretty cool trick, indeed.
Another trick we learned was to repurpose the content from our single-source repository and reformat it, often with little human intervention, into a tri-paned, online help system. We performed these magical multi-channel publishing tricks in record time, compared to creating such content from scratch. Impressive, to say the least.
When we really wanted to show off, we’d prepare our content to be shared via email or downloaded from the Web. We’d save the files into Web-friendly PDFs, complete with hypertext-linked cross-references and the ability for users to keyword search through complete document sets (no matter how many pages long they might be) in just a few seconds. Talk about tricky!
When we made the move to XML authoring and content management, we really got tricky with it. We leveraged new standards like DocBook and DITA, which we used to create books even faster and more efficiently than before!
In case you haven’t noticed by now, what all these models have in common is that they start with a preconceived notion that what we create is a bunch of words, perhaps accompanied by a few images, that will eventually be combined into some sort of book-like product. But what our customers want (and most often need) are answers to questions, not books.
Mobile Is Exploding!
Visit a local coffee house. Travel on a bus, airplane, or train. Just walk down the street. What will you notice if you pay attention? The world in which we live is increasingly reliant on mobile devices. They’re everywhere! From smartphones to eReaders, from tablet computer to laptops, people use mobile electronic devices for just about every conceivable reason. And, as their reliance on mobile increases, so too does your need to provide content of value to them on the device of their choosing.
It’s not enough to make a PDF available on your support website. First off, reading a PDF on a smartphone might be possible, but it’s not easy. Second, much of the content produced by technical writers that is locked up in PDF files has not been optimized for mobile. It’s often littered with the lingo of keyboards (such as “click this” or “right-click that”) and is based on the idea that we’d be reading a book-like file on a computer screen.
A New Trick in Town
One thing is clear, we need new tricks. The first trick we need to adopt is one that is optimized for iPads, Androids, iPhones, and the hoards of mobile devices that have yet to be announced or even imagined. This new approach needs to help us perform feats of magic that will amaze and delight those who use our technical communication content and make them want to return again and again to us for more.
One candidate for our bag of tricks is Open Manual Format (www.omanual.org), also known as oManual, an open XML standard that breaks from existing document-centric paradigms, but is built upon our previous lessons learned and leverages existing technical documentation and instructional design best practices.
oManual is in use today by iFixit.com (the largest provider of free repair manuals on the Web) and O’Reilly Media’s Make Magazine (http://makezine.com). iFixit.com uses oManual because the site teaches people how to repair broken consumer products (game consoles, smartphones, tablet computers, laptops, even cars) and finds that the oManual standard is more relevant to the needs of the audience.
oManual incorporates multimedia from the start. It is a format that is perfect for service manuals and other types of visually rich technical documentation designed to help people repair, replace, assemble, disassemble, or maintain consumer products.
Because oManual was designed to present content for mobile devices, its emphasis is where it belongs, on photos with textual annotations. Instead of burying images in pages of text, an oManual topic will likely include a dominant image, accompanied by some text, and perhaps some callouts—warnings, cautions, or notes, in cases where this content would prove valuable.
To remain relevant, technical communication pros need to explore new standards like oManual and find new ways to add new-and-improved methods to their bag of tricks that address the fact that we’re no longer the makers of books, but instead, the creator of exceedingly relevant customer experiences.
SCOTT ABEL is a content strategist and communication process improvement evangelist. He is president and CEO of The Content Wrangler, an internationally recognized online source of information about digital publishing, content marketing, social media, and content management. Scott is a frequent contributor to a variety of journals, magazines, and online publications and is a popular speaker at content industry events. He co-produces the Intelligent Content Conference and Content Strategy Applied North America. Follow Scott on Twitter: @ScottAbel.
