"Less is More": The Year of the New Content Communicator

By Maxwell Hoffmann

Much has been written in this past year about our changing roles and responsibilities, and the need for rebranding. A few years ago, most of us called ourselves "technical writers" and prided ourselves on skill sets with certain proprietary authoring solutions. There have even been several articles or references within Intercom regarding new job titles or rebranding that we should embrace.

Two events in 2012 changed the job market for 2013, as well as our individual and collective value in the marketplace:

• The wide proliferation of tablets and eReaders, along with the general public’s willingness to accept the few limitations that happen when one moves away from paper
• The availability of tools that will publish to multiscreen HTML, enabling single-source publishing to go to a variety of disparate devices in one action

Sometime in 2010 and 2011, technical communication consumers became accustomed to on-demand information in video format, even though it was seldom framed within the "technical documents" that they were reading: video information on one channel, technical documentation in another.

Now, consumers expect more than frequently updated websites. They demand and expect at least a Quick Start Guide or an executive summary version of technical instructions updated daily on their tablets or smartphones. At first blush, this seems like one more technical communication nightmare—yet another form of deliverable to add to the matrix of different versions, languages, etc., that we are expected to deliver. This is actually a blessing in disguise; over time it will make our jobs more creative and exciting. These trends will also dramatically increase our value within the job market.

Our jobs have never been more creative or more dynamic

On the surface, it would appear that each of us is expected to be a writer, storyboard editor, content curator, videographer, animator, and heaven knows what else. Because we now have tools or publishing environments capable of handling all of these aspects of communications, some portions of conventional news media have assumed that each of us must wear every hat and master every skill. Dream on.

We’ve all either worked with or tried to be a jack-of-all-trades. It has never worked. At best, it leads to mediocrity, and if one is prolific, it leads to a temporary, false sense of productivity.

Yes, we do all have to become familiar with, and even somewhat competent at, each of the communication channels described above. Yet, in my long career, I’ve never met one person who was heavily talented in every one of those areas. So, what is the solution?

Increased collaboration and flexibility.

Even if you are not destined to become the team member who will create enticing and effective videos or screen simulations, as a writer or content creator you do need to be able to outline what should be "filmed" to make your technical communication deliverable more effective. Whether it is a native talent or not, we all need to learn how to think visually and envision instructions in forms of images, not just words.

This transition to new communication media will not be an overnight process, but we have a lot going in our favor. All of us have had to communicate without words at one time or another. Our ancient ancestors had some form of rich communications without a written language tens of thousands of years ago. Essentially, we have that ability and power to communicate through images in our DNA. It only needs to be awakened.

"They had faces then"

In the seminal movie Sunset Boulevard, about someone who didn’t move on with the times in Hollywood, faded movie queen Norma Desmond brags "We didn’t need dialogue. We had faces!" Her dream world of a return to silent communication may be slowly approaching us.

For many reasons, we will continue to see images (static and moving) replace a sizeable portion of the textual content that we create today. Future generations might look back on our current technical documentation and react the way we do when we attempt to wade through thick Victorian prose. I’m not referring to Dickens—try reading one of the "penny dreadfuls" or romantic "purple prose" fiction from the 1880s.

Movies, radio, and television truncated the attention span of mid-20th-century consumers. More recently, we have undergone forces from social media—a Niagara Falls of video and constant updates that has further diminished both our attention span and patience. Communication that used to require hours to consume now only allow for minutes or seconds.

For example, try using LinkedIn’s fairly zippy app on an iPad or a Galaxy for two weeks. Then, try to go back to using the multi-step UI on the Web. It’s not easy. Our readers and consumers are undergoing a similar transformation. Icons and images swiftly become familiar friends, whereas extensive scrolling through more text-oriented content soon begins to wear thin.

The new, international English

To effectively serve a global audience, if source content is created in English, the fewer words the better. Gerunds and dozens of other constructs specific to English simply don’t translate at all into many languages. About the only path to success is one of many forms of simplified English widely documented on the Internet. And, whenever possible, the best solution might be no words at all. We need to move away from 15 successive screen captures to video screen simulations and moving, 3D-exploded parts diagrams that the user can manipulate.

Good writing will always be needed

Writing will never completely go away. We have the opportunity to become more effective (and more highly compensated) authors by proving that "less is more." Much of what we document will, in some sense, become simpler; software will be forced to appear and behave more app-like. This will take a few years. But, in the near future, almost everyone will either have a tablet that does everything, or a tablet and a laptop that have virtually identical UIs and apps.

Ironically, if you are a gifted writer who produces excellent (though lengthy) narrative prose, you have an ideal starting point to become a sought-after, 21st-century communicator. All you have to do is hone your skills in selectivity—editing and paring down content. In addition, you can master the skill of converting "word pictures" into actual images.

Many of us have struggled for years trying to find the right combination of sentences to create a visual sense of what should be taking place on a software screen or with a technical instrument. Now, we finally have affordable, accessible tools to capture motion or video—essentially, to make mini-movies that condense 2.5 pages of text to about 15 seconds. We can’t change our ways overnight, but we can change them. We all have a disparate combination of skills that will help us accomplish the goal to achieve more visual communications. We just aren’t in the habit of using all of the required skills at the same time.

What employers are looking for now

Ironically, many hiring managers don’t really know exactly what they want. They too are befuddled by the dynamics of all the change I have described above. But the number-one complaint I’ve heard from technical publications managers is, "Much of my staff is about to retire, and I’m having trouble finding anyone who can write correct grammar and simple, concise, accurate text." Even though images are important, even though some of us live and breathe on some form of social networking in our off hours, we still have to communicate with accurate text.

One extreme example comes to mind. I have a good friend who was called in to "heal" a previously constructed XML authoring solution that had no control over page breaks. One ill-fated page break sent a critical sentence to the next page. The documentation involved the maintenance of nuclear power plants. Someone on the staff didn’t turn the page and thought that he/she had completed the process. A leak occurred that led to a $2,000,000 fine.

An ideal portfolio for today’s job interviews

In the past, many of us had links to 15-page blogs, 200-page websites, or other extensive loads of content to showcase our writing skills. Switch gears and try the following: take a potential employer’s windy tract of Web or tech docs and republish it using embedded video and reduced English to cut the content in half. Use a vocabulary of 2,400 words. Keep sentence length to around a maximum of 20 words. Avoid all English constructs that your research reveals to be bad for language translation and localization.

You can actually create your own return-on-investment calculator to prove how many hours/weeks and dollars you will save in terms of timely product release and drastically reduced translation costs. And, oh yes, include the financial effects of "litigation-free" instructions that make the content "bullet proof." If your job interview sales pitch focuses on these issues, you won’t be between projects for very long.

I love writing more than any other talent I knowingly possess. Yet, I know that if I stick to my keyboard and continue to communicate primarily through long, narrative, descriptive text, I’ll eventually end up like Norma Desmond, waving at a parade that passed by long ago.

Maxwell Hoffmann is Adobe’s product evangelist for the Technical Communication Suite and a former product manager for FrameMaker at Frame Technology. He spent nearly 15 years in the translation industry, where he managed or published over one million pages of multilingual content in thousands of projects. He has managed projects in DITA and XML, as well as authoring tools such as Word, InDesign, QuarkXPress, and structured FrameMaker. Hoffmann is based in a virtual Adobe office near Portland, OR, and has presented face-to-face, hands-on training to over 1,200 people in scalable authoring solutions.