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Gordon R. Meyer

Basil Wolverton's instructional design

Comic artist Basil Wolverton's series, Whiz Comics, ran from 1945 to 1952 and featured a large number of "how to" topics. Clearly humorous, but also great fun from an instructional design perspective. The Dinosaur Gardens website has a fine collection to peruse.

Posted: July 15, 2010 link to this item, respond to this item

When the going gets tough

if your career in technical writing has you down, perhaps you should consider calling yourself an information architect instead. That's not exactly the point of Klariti's article, How to Get Out of Technical Writing and Make More Money, but in my analysis that's the bottom line. Of the suggested career changes, most are just synonymous positions. But hey, maybe "sanitation engineers" really do make more than "janitors."

Posted: June 19, 2010 link to this item, respond to this item

Interactive Word command reference

Microsoft has an interesting command reference tool for users switching from Word 2003 to Word 2007. It mimics the Word interface and, as you choose commands, shows and tells you where the command is located in the new interface. This takes advantage of the users spatial and visual memory for frequently-used commands, but it strikes me as overly comprehensive--a common tech writing mistake--because it also includes commands that have not changed between the versions. In that scenario, it seems unlikely that a user would refer to this tool at all.

Posted: June 16, 2010 link to this item, respond to this item

Written by committee

The Ubuntu Manual Project offers a free PDF of a getting started guide for the free operating system. The 160 page document purports to be jargon-free and has been written by a group of 21 writers and editors, plus a very large extended team.

Posted: June 15, 2010 link to this item, respond to this item

Authoring Apple Help with Texinfo

Michael McCracken describes the process of creating Apple Help, HTML, and PDF from a single source base using Texinfo.

Posted: May 27, 2010 link to this item, respond to this item

Firefox attempts humor

Humor in technical writing and UI design is a very tricky thing, and a thematic topic over the years here at Usable Help. A recent error dialog from Firefox seems to strike a nice balance if you were to consider such an approach necessary.

Posted: May 19, 2010 link to this item, respond to this item

Teach them to fish

Teachers have long held that instead of instructing students how to do a specific task, a more viable strategy is to teach how to find and utilize information. The web comic xkcd brings the point home with this edition, which could eliminate a large portion of user documentation if its adoption becomes too widespread.

Posted: May 19, 2010 link to this item, respond to this item

Complexity as a form of job security

UX Magazine, in The Impossible Bloomberg Makeover, discusses the odd, but real, case where users resist efforts to improve a system because it threatens their mastery of the difficult.

I'm reminded of cases where writers resist simpler documentation because creating complex, lengthy manuals demonstrates that the product is too complex to be documented in any other fashion. Yes, that's an actual, but circular, argument.

Posted: May 3, 2010 link to this item, respond to this item

Apple Publications Style Guide updated

Apple's in-house style guide for documentation has been updated. The new version, dated December 2009, includes terminology for iPhone. Download the PDF copy from Apple's developer center.

Posted: April 16, 2010 link to this item, respond to this item

Remembering Microsoft Bob

Harry McCracken, writing for Technologizer, provides a nice overview of the history and legacy of Microsoft Bob, the daring yet doomed computerized personal assistant.

According to the article, Bob was born out of desire to eliminate the manual necessary to use Microsoft Publisher, but by the time Bob shipped, it had a much larger role. And, ironically, came with 29 pages of documentation, as well as an optional 219 supporting book.