“Hire Expert Writers,” Says Google That is the title of a post from M2Bespoke about Google’s emphasis on returning reputable content. What is an “expert writer” in this context? Many of those who have commented on it and passed it around take it to mean expertise in writing. That seems to be the interpretation that… Read More »
Does a bottom-up information architecture improve search ranking? This is another in a series responding to questions from my TC Dojo series on Bottom-up Information Architecture. I have several questions from the second session on writing, but I’m still working off the backlog of questions from the first session on organization. (Because we are moving… Read More »
It is easy to set an ideal for technical communication that it should deliver the best solution — the ideal solution — to every problem. Many critiques of Web search as a tool for finding technical solutions focus on the many less than perfect solutions that any search query returns. How is the user to find the ideal solutions in the… Read More »
‘Any technology you use should be “Googlable”‘. These are the words of Bill Scott, VP Engineering, Merchant | Retail | Online Payments at PayPal, as reported by the amazing Sarah Maddox. (I say amazing because Sarah manages to lucidly and intelligently blog just about every conference session she attends. Having just helped cover the LavaCon conference, and… Read More »
In, This Is Why It Matters if Your User Guide Is Just an Afterthought, Bill Kerschbaum posits a scenario in which a potential customer, impressed by your glossy website, downloads a trial version of your software, is initially impressed, but then tries to figure out how to do something, is disappointed by the poor user manual and decides not… Read More »
There is a long-running radio program on the BBC called Desert Island Discs that asks celebrities what recordings they would take with them if they were going to be stranded on a desert island. Today, the question does not make as much practical sense as when it was first broadcast in 1942. As long as… Read More »
I argued in Too Big to Browse; Too Small to Search, that search works best when it has a large amount of content to work with. But it occurs to me that there is a really important caveat to be made, which I can best express as the difference between findability and searchability. The distinction… Read More »
Findability continues to be the bete noire of technical communication. This may be a parallax error, but it seems that findability is more of a problem in technical communication than in other fields. The reason, I suspect, is that many technical documentation suites are too big to browse but too small to search. I have… Read More »
It struck me today that the Web does Minimalism. Not only does it do it, it does it naturally, and it does it well. Consider: Here’s a common listing of the principle tenants of minimalism (borrowed from http://www.ryerson.ca/~ipederse/Minimalism.htm via Google): Take An Action-Oriented Approach Aim for Guided Exploration Position the Documentation in the Task Domain… Read More »
The classical structure of a website is that of a tree. The trunk is the homepage. From there you climb the tree, upward and outward until finally you reach the leaves. That is how we design websites. That is how we test websites. It’s just not how we use websites.