Tips & Tricks


Advices, suggestions and ideas on developing and improving help and manual writing and production.

Audience Analysis In Technical Writing: How To Get The Facts Right

Audience Analysis In Technical Writing: How To Get The Facts Right [Featured]

The effectiveness of any technical documentation depends on how well the technical writer has tailored its content to appeal to the target audience. But in many cases, tailoring content for the target audience is not the challenge.
The key challenge is how to identify and analyze the audience. So it’s not strange when you see technical writers asking “How can you tailor your content to appeal to a specific audience when you don’t even know them?” This is one of the reasons why users don’t read your manuals.
Audience analysis is perhaps the single most important aspect of technical writing. If you do it right, your customer support team will heave a sigh of relief and you can slash your customer support cost.
But what happens when you don’t hit the bull’s eye? You’ll have to spend more on customer support. Perhaps, create a new manual, and you can imagine the dent it can put on your product’s name as a brand, especially when your competitors are doing it right. Now you can avoid such a scenario by simply analyzing your audience.

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Why Users Don’t Read Your Manuals and How to Make Them To

Why Users Don't Read Your Manuals and How to Make Them To [Featured]

You’ve designed a near perfect product or built a great software. And then you hired some of the best technical writers to write a user-friendly help manual to solve usability problems. You want your product users to start enjoying the product from the first minute. The technical writers did a great a job, and your user experience team confirmed that.
But after launching your product or releasing an update, you seem to be spending a lot more on customer support. In many cases, the answers users are looking for are right inside the user manual. So now you’re asking the same question many manufacturers and developers have been asking. Do product users ever read help manuals?

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5 Essential Skills You Need To Become A Great Technical Writer

images/essential-skills-technical-writer.jpg

What’s the difference between a great technical writer and a great writer?
Both of them are great writers. But one of them has mastered the key skills required to make almost anyone understand and use almost any product that requires some technical knowledge regardless of their technological know-how.
If you are a technical writer or perhaps you are interested in becoming one, it is important for you to master the required skills too. So to make technical writing easier for you, we’ve compiled 5 of the most important skills every technical writer should master to be a professional.

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Print vs. Screen Manual - Which One Do You Need?

Print vs. Screen Manual - Which One Do You Need? [Featured]

Picking the right format to publish your help files can be tricky, especially if you’re creating your first help manual and you want to avoid the biggest mistakes first time help manual authors make. The right format determines if your users have access to your help files exactly how and when they need it.
If you’re using a help authoring tool (and you should because they make it easier to write better help documents in half the time), publishing in multiple formats should be no trouble at all.
The big question we’re answering today is, should you publish a print manual (hard copy), or a screen manual (PDF, CHM, Web based HTML, eBook format…).

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How To Write A Great Help Manual

How To Write A Great Help Manual [Featured]

When you write a great help manual you do two things – help customers find and use appropriate solutions easily and slash your business customer support costs significantly.
Even more, customers will be glad to recommend your product, and leaders in your business niche will easily recommend your brand to other experts and their customers. This is why writing a great help manual is one of the best investment any business can make.
But how exactly can you write a great help manual?

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Biggest Mistakes First Time Help Manual Authors Make

Biggest Mistakes First Time Help Manual Authors Make [Featured]

What’s the worst mistake you can make as a first time help manual author?

A good help manual is user-friendly, and contains clear instructions that users can find and use easily. But if you’re a first time help manual author, creating a good one can be a tough task, especially if it’s your first technical writing project.
Interestingly, every great help manual writer had their first moment too, and made several mistakes on their first attempt. We’ve compiled these mistakes, so you wouldn’t repeat any of them. Thankfully, you can learn from these mistakes and create a top-notch help manual on your first attempt.

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Help documentation doesn’t have to be boring

Help documentation doesn't have to be boring [Featured]

Let’s face it, help documentation today has a terrible image. Almost everyone you talk to about it has a bad impression of help manuals. There are lots of different reasons for this, some of the most common are:

  • It doesn’t answer the questions you have
  • You can’t find the answer even though you know it’s in there somewhere
  • The manual is hard to navigate
  • The documentation is out of date
  • The documentation doesn’t exist yet

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When help and manuals go wrong

help and manuals go wrong [Featured]

Almost everyone has at least one help related horror story to tell. Whether it is about trying to understand a product when the help manual has been written in such poor English that it is unintelligible, or a product that has shipped with a manual for entirely the wrong model. Perhaps the story is about one of those manuals that are packed so full of details that there is too much information and it becomes almost impossible to find the answer you need quickly. There are many ways that help manuals can go wrong but in general they can usually be broken down into two main areas:

  • The manual is out of date or has the wrong information
  • The manual is poorly written or is difficult to navigate

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Best practice in writing help documents and manuals

Writing Help Documents [Featured]

Writing help documentation can be a tricky process. You need to learn to think like a product user not a developer. As the person responsible for writing the help documentation you may well have been involved with your product for a while, and have become very familiar with how it works. This is useful when writing help documentation but it can also be a disadvantage as you approach the product in a different way to those looking at it for the first time. What may be obvious to you may be a complete mystery to someone without your prior experience of the product, or knowledge of the design process.

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Why writing a quality help manual may be the best investment your business makes

Customer Support [Featured]

Launching a new product takes both time and money, in any business both of these are generally in short supply. There are always pressures to reduce costs and get the product complete and ready for sale at the earliest opportunity.
Sometimes when looking for ways to keep costs to a minimum it can be tempting to think of a help manual as being an extra expense that should be produced as cheaply as possible. It is a common belief that most people should be able to work out how to use a product by themselves and if they do have any difficulties they can always call your help-desk for assistance.
This error in thinking may well be one of the biggest mistakes made by businesses today. No-one can deny that producing proper help documentation does involve some cost, but to consider the cost without looking at the savings incurred by your help manual is to look at only half the picture.

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