In September 2011, Eeva Viljanen attended her first-ever #TCUK conference. In the subsequent Winter 2011 edition of ISTC Communicator magazine, she summarised the conference and its sessions, providing a specific focus on the closing keynote session presented by IKEA on the importance of visual guides in documentation, which has been reproduced here under kind permission of both Eeva and the ISTC.
Eeva Viljanen is a board member of STVY, the Finnish Technical Communications Society. She is a self-employed Technical Writer and Translator, and a visiting lecturer at Tampere University, Finland.
LinkedIn: Eeva Viljanen
In the Forefront of Visual Guides by Eeva Viljanen
IKEA probably leaves no one untouched. This is the case also among technical communicators judging by the eager show of hands among the audience, when Jan Fredlund and Magnus Ohlsson asked about user experiences with IKEA instructions. Jan’s and Magnus’ talk The Ikea Concept: Global and ‘Textless’ Communication, a Pedagogical Challenge had indeed attracted a lot of interest.
Both Jan and Magnus have worked at IKEA since the 1980′s with illustrations, instructions and communications. The initial decision at IKEA to go with graphics rather than text came from the rapid global growth of the company and the host of languages to be translated. IKEA produces 400 assembly instructions per year. The motto is, of course: We do our work, and you do yours, and together we save money.
Jan’s and Magnus’s advice on graphics are simple, but they work. With an easy start the user is motivated. Listing the steps in accurate order is essential. Early succeess encourages the user to go on. If the object needs to be turned around during the process, show the object from different angles. That’s the way to do it! And by the way, if you were wondering about the exotic product names, they come from IKEA’s Scandinavian heritage; some which do not translate particularly well in the global market.
Special Resource
The ISTC have also granted permission for the reprint of its Special Supplement on Technical Illustrations, published in conjunction with the 2011 Winter edition of Communicator magazine. Featuring such distinguished writers as Douglas Newton (MISTC), Patrick Hofmann and Matt Pierce, this supplement covers iconography, meeting end-user expectations, speaking visually and drawing with pencil and paper.
ISTC Special Supplement on Technical Illustration
Notes: The Special Supplement is published by the ISTC, and Adobe has permission from the ISTC to distribute it. The Editor welcomes articles and letters for publication. Opinions expressed by contributors are not necessarily those of the ISTC. All articles are copyright and are the property of the authors, who have asserted their moral rights. For permission to reproduce an article, contact the author directly or through the Editor. All trademarks are the property of their registered owners. Advertisements are accepted on the understanding that they conform to the British Code of Advertising Practice. Acceptance of an advertisement does not imply that a product or service has the ISTC’s endorsement.
Why ReadSoft Chose to Publish AIRHelp
ReadSoft is headquartered in Helsingborg, Sweden. Jason Nichols is Technical Writer and Trainer at ReadSoft.
Twitter: @jasonanichols Web www.jasonanichols.net
Publishing to Adobe AIRHelp by Jason Nichols
A few years ago our Technical Communication team upgraded to Adobe’s Technical Communication Suite 2. One of the reasons why we decided to get TCS2 was the ability of RoboHelp 8 to output to Adobe AIR—at the time a brand new publishing platform. (And not just for technical documentation, but any application. TweetDeck is perhaps the most famous example.)
There are a few reasons why we publish to Adobe AIR, which I’d like to explain below.
Modern look and feel
Technical documents have moved a long way from the days of WinHelp and Compiled Help (CHM files). The first thing that strikes you when looking at AIRHelp is that it’s modern:
An Example of Adobe AIRHelp
Documents that sell
Technical documents also market your organisation, in the same way a website does. An old website built on old technology with outdated colour schemes is going to have a negative effect on visitors. If I was a potential customer browsing the documentation, and it looked outdated, I would definitely think the company was old-school. I would lean more favourably toward the organisation that looked modern.
So this is a general tip for all you tech writers out there: Irrespective of what output(s) you produce, spend some time making it look cutting edge (at best) or up-to-date (at least).
Online/offline modes
AIRHelp can act as a web browser and display content not contained in the original AIR file, but rather content on a web server. Our content is updated continuously, between product releases. (This is because there is always so much to document!) A major product release may be the current one for a whole year, but fixes and service packs are always released in between. In this typical software release schedule, it obviously makes sense to be able to update and improve the documentation at the same time. Or, better, anytime!
We host our Help content on a web server as well, as HTML pages (also generated from RoboHelp). This week I updated several topics in a guide and added a few extra ones. I then generated the Help and published the new HTML output to the web server. And anyone with the AIRHelp installed and an Internet connection will see the new content without having to do anything.
The benefits for consultants
Being online though can sometimes be a luxury. Our consultants—those that perform installations and configuration—often don’t have Internet access when they are on a customer’s site. But they still need the documentation. So they take the AIRHelp with them on their laptops. When they come back to the office, the content can be updated.
This is a much better solution than PDFs. PDFs cannot be updated. They are static, passive. One of the big problems we had is that a lot of our consultants were walking around with documentation that was literally years old. They have heavy workloads and I can imagine they don’t have the time to check for new versions. But as a result we always had technical and support questions about various issues that they could not find the answer to in the documentation because it was an old version.
Whither printed documentation?
We’re really trying to push PDFs into the background and to get people to use AIRHelp and our HTML pages instead. It takes a lot of time to publish a document for print purposes. I mean, we use RoboHelp to generate Word documents and macros to apply final formatting and create the PDF. But a significant amount of time is taken with fixing small formatting issues. This is the nature of printed documentation—each page has to look right. And in our case (and not just for us) people rarely print out an entire guide. They just want to browse the contents and look for a particular piece of information.
Commenting function
AIRHelp gives readers the ability to add their own comments to a topic. We’ve used this for peer reviews. However, we use RoboHelp 8 and the ability to administer comments (view, edit, delete) is limited. I’ve heard this has been improved in RoboHelp 9 but I haven’t yet looked at it.
Conclusion
In summary, we use AIRHelp because of its modern look and feel, it’s ease to push out updates, and because it has an offline mode which is a must-have for our consultants.
To learn more about ReadSoft’s implementation of AIRHelp, read an interview with Jason.