Letter from the UK: Documentation In a Personalised World

On the 9th September 2014, Apple announced a range of health-based wearable devices that will help capture biometric data. According to The Guardian, the software will allow developers to build bespoke health apps for a broad range of medical needs. This, the newspaper states, is part of a trend to make healthcare more personalised.

Personalisation is also growing in consumer technology. The latest brochure from John Lewis (a very popular department store in the UK) includes an article looking at a day in the life of a person with all the latest automated technologies. In this person's life, thermostats adjust to the temperature they prefer, and lightbulbs flash to warn them that a football match on TV is about to start (see the image to the right).

DunnHumby, a software company based in the UK, enables supermarkets to offer personalised and relevant shopping offers. It's been reported some supermarkets have identified, by analysing someone's purchasing patterns, women who were pregnant before they've known themselves.

I could go on with many other examples to illustrate this trend.

So are we likely to see a growth in personalised documentation for users? There are some of examples of documentation that's moving towards this type of personalisation.

At MadWorld 14, I saw Lynn Carrier's presentation on a custom documentation solution at Illumina. Previously, customers had to identify the 500 pages that were relevant to their configuration inside 10 manuals, in order to learn how to use the products. Customers were unclear which documents to read, in what order, and which if-then scenarios applied to them. Illumina has created an automated custom documentation tool based on their content in Madcap Flare  that can generate any of the 4,570 different possible configurations for their products. This browser-based tool enables customers to select the products and methods they use and generate a single 50 page document containing what the user needs, and nothing more.

We've worked with a client creating bug tracking software to develop online Help where the code examples in the topics would change depending on the programming language the person was using.

Also, In the early days of eBay, some of the Help topics used JavaScript to include information on the specific product you were buying or selling. It would tell you the minimum bid price for the item you had actually been looking at just before you hit the Help link.

In short, some progress is being made.

It seems to me that people will expect the user assistance to personalised in the same way as the technology in their lives will be doing. This will require someone to create content that can be adaptable and is able to interact with the device itself.

However, I wonder, are technical communicators up to the challenge? Can they adapt to this more complex type of solution? Will they be developing this type of content, or will it fall under the purview of the developers?

What do you think?

Ellis Pratt is director at Cherryleaf, a UK technical writing services company. Ranked the most influential blogger on technical communication in Europe, Ellis is a specialist in the field of creating clear and simple information users will love.

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