Blog « Freelance Technical Writing Services

What’s the Point of Innovation? [Good Design #2]

September 29, 2011 9 Comments

My last post discussed Dieter Rams’s 10 principles of good design and why good design is important for content writing. Over the next 10 posts I’ll explore each of the principles. We’ll look at what good design means for content writing and technical writing.

First, some thoughts about what good design is not. Good design isn’t cool graphics or a sleek look. Design in this context means form that follows function. It describes the “shape” of your content—all the visual aspects of it, including media format, layout and structure, style and tone, typography, flow, and more. It speaks to usability and user experience.

So let’s look at the first principle of good design.

Good design is innovative. The possibilities for innovation are not, by any means, exhausted. Technological development is always offering new opportunities for innovative design. But innovative design always develops in tandem with innovative technology, and can never be an end in itself.

Get Innovative! Maybe.

In the earliest days of the Web, documents were on one page—often, a very long one that required lots of scrolling. Then HTML came along and introduced the <a> tag, and suddenly you could link several short pages instead of having one long one. As technology grew, so did capabilities for websites, and multimedia was introduced through Flash and MIDI files. Later, DHTML and Java script were introduced, and the web became interactive—elements like expanding text created opportunities for web content and online help. Today, HTML5 is rolling out, with new capabilities that will allow content writers to do new things with mobile devices and web pages. As technology advances, so do the opportunities to be innovative in designing content.

Each of these evolving technologies has provided opportunities for innovative design. The best designs made it easier to use the web, find help, or watch video demos instead of reading procedures.

But just because an innovative design is possible, that doesn’t mean it should be used. Design for its own sake only gets in the way of a positive user experience. That’s why website splash pages have become so widely detested, and why you’ll never see a bubble mouse trail again (except perhaps on MySpace). While it might impress your customers to show off a new design feature, the novelty will quickly wear off; if the design doesn’t actually yield greater usability or create better understanding, your customers will tire of it and become resentful that you weren’t more thoughtful of their needs.

But when innovative design improves a user’s experience, it should be seriously considered. I’ve already mentioned collapsing/expanding text on web pages. This advancement allowed technical writers to create sleeker, crisper online help topics. Nonessential information could be hidden, but still easily available to users; they could dig deeper without navigating away from the topic.

How Then Shall We Design?

The challenge for content writers and technical writers is threefold:

Stay current on developing technologies. This is easier said than done, since you never know which technology will lead to new design possibilities. The key is to keep your eyes open and be always learning from a wide variety of sources.
Find innovative ways to apply new capabilities in content creation. This involves practicing disciplines that develop your creativity. Allow yourself to be bored. Cut out stuff that produces a distracted life. Keep asking foundational questions like Why and What If. “If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it” is a lie—everything is broken at some level, in some way.
Differentiate good design from bad design. This is tricky, because an innovation can be a good design in one context but horrible in another. QR codes are an example of an overused innovation that has a limited value. In some contexts, it’s clever and helpful; in others, it’s just clever-ish and trendy.

Technology is always evolving, and with it come new opportunities to improve content design. It is the task of content writers and technical writers to keep pushing the envelope—not for the sake of innovation itself, but for the sake of our readers. Innovative design is only good when it improves the user’s experience.

Photo credit: Shahram Sharif

Filed under Design, Technical Writing Tagged with content writing, design, Dieter Rams

The 10 Commandments for Designing Your Content

September 22, 2011 11 Comments

Dieter Rams Braun SK 4 Phonosuper Record Player

Dieter Rams's Braun SK 4 Phonosuper Record Player

Everything is designed—few things are designed well. Unfortunately, poor design can be detrimental to your business.

The master of good design is Dieter Rams, who developed the 10 principles of good design (also called the 10 commandments of good design). Rams is a German industrial designer who worked with Braun from the 1950s until 1995. His designs include coffee makers, calculators, shavers, radios, and office equipment. They are marked by elegance and simplicity, marrying functionality and beauty.

Rams’s famous 10 principles are usually applied to products (most notably Apple products like the iPod), but they can be co-opted for technical content as well. I would even argue that you cannot have good technical content apart from these 10 principles.

So let’s look at Dieter Rams’s 10 principles of good design.

Good design:

Is innovative. The possibilities for innovation are not, by any means, exhausted. Technological development is always offering new opportunities for innovative design. But innovative design always develops in tandem with innovative technology, and can never be an end in itself.

Makes a product useful. A product is bought to be used. It has to satisfy certain criteria, not only functional, but also psychological and aesthetic. Good design emphasizes the usefulness of a product while disregarding anything that could possibly detract from it.

Is aesthetic. The aesthetic quality of a product is integral to its usefulness because products we use every day affect our person and our well-being. But only well-executed objects can be beautiful.

Makes a product understandable. It clarifies the product’s structure. Better still, it can make the product talk. At best, it is self-explanatory.

Is unobtrusive. Products fulfilling a purpose are like tools. They are neither decorative objects nor works of art. Their design should therefore be both neutral and restrained, to leave room for the user’s self-expression.

Is honest. It does not make a product more innovative, powerful, or valuable than it really is. It does not attempt to manipulate the consumer with promises that cannot be kept.

Is long-lasting. It avoids being fashionable and therefore never appears antiquated. Unlike fashionable design, it lasts many years—even in today’s throwaway society.

Is thorough down to the last detail. Nothing must be arbitrary or left to chance. Care and accuracy in the design process show respect towards the consumer.

Is environmentally friendly. Design makes an important contribution to the preservation of the environment. It conserves resources and minimizes physical and visual pollution throughout the lifecycle of the product.

Is as little design as possible. Less, but better—because it concentrates on the essential aspects, and the products are not burdened with non-essentials.

Can you see the connection to technical content? Think of technical content as part of the product itself—in fact, often the best technical content is integrated directly into the product. But even if the content is in a printed user guide or on a separate website, the goal is to make the instruction as seamless as possible so that use of the product is interrupted as little as possible. To do this, the content must be designed, and designed well.

This isn’t a call for beautiful content—good design and beauty are two different things. Design starts with functionality and purpose, and beauty ought to flow out of that. Good technical content (as with good design) is elegant, useful, and crisp.

On the contrary, badly designed content makes a product more difficult to use and less understandable, is ugly and a chore to read, is obtrusive, leaves out details, and often is bloated with unhelpful information. Badly designed technical content interferes with the product itself and makes the user’s experience more punishing than rewarding.

I’ve written before about technical content that is true, good, and beautiful. Dieter Rams captures that perfectly in his 10 principles. Unfortunately, it’s all too easy to find examples of badly designed content, but Intext Writing is committed to good design in everything we do.

Photo credit: Nick Wade

Filed under Design, Technical Writing Tagged with Dieter Rams, good design, technical content, Technical Writing

Case Study: How a Silent Movie Told the Best Story

August 31, 2011 Leave a comment

There’s a lot of talk among technical writers about keeping up with the latest trends in technology—using QR codes and creating user assistance for mobile apps and taking advantage of social media. But what do you do when the user may not even know what a smartphone is? How do you create amazing user assistance for customers that don’t even have speakers on their computers?

This was the challenge our first client faced. Community Spice provides affordable website templates and hosting for churches and other non-profit organizations that don’t have technical expertise or a budget that allows for a high-end web presence. Their templates provide several tools for incorporating multimedia into the websites, but Community Spice’s typical customer wasn’t even savvy enough to upload files.

Community Spice wanted to fully equip its customers without overwhelming them. They had tried writing their own procedures for tasks like adding images and creating external links, but they found that many users were still having trouble grasping the concepts.

We decided to create a series of screencasts—video tutorials that walk the user through the steps in a simple, easy to understand manner. Because many of their users operate computers with no speakers, narrated videos weren’t an option. So the trick was to use callouts that would explain each action in a simple way. While a narrated video can be chatty, the callouts had to have very few words and also clearly describe the step.

The result was a set of minimalistic videos that gave instructions for very specific tasks. For example, “Uploading” was separated into “Uploading a file” and “Uploading an image,” even though the tasks were very similar and could otherwise be combined into one procedure. The videos are slow-paced to reduce the chance of confusion and the instructions are written very simply.

Here’s one of the videos. What do you think? Did we accomplish the goal?

(Click to play)

This is what Shawn Quinn, Owner and CEO of Community Spice, had to say:

Bill with Intext Writing quickly got to the bottom of exactly what we were looking for in creating instructional videos for our technology. The process was refreshingly both extremely smooth and efficient. And the final video and content quality exceeded our expectations.

As George Lucas has taught us (several times), it’s not how flashy your product is that matters. It’s how well you tell the story.

Filed under Case Studies, Technical Writing Tagged with how to, screencasts, tutorials, video

Could Apostrophe’s Ruin Your Companys Reputation?

July 12, 2011 2 Comments

If you’re already posting a correction in the comments section, bully for you! If not, this article is for you.

One of the most perplexing crimes in the English language is abuse of the apostrophe. Its rules are simple enough once you know them, but for some reason even otherwise respectable businesses brutalize this poor glyph—to the detriment of their own reputations!

Nothing makes an exceptional business look mediocre like the neglect of basic punctuation. It efficiently distracts from the message you mean to send and replaces it with messages of sloppiness, incompetence, and apathy.

Don’t let simple grammar mistakes send the wrong message to your customers. Here’s a couple quick videos that’ll help you master the apostrophe’s role in your materials.

Cute but quite helpful:

An educational rant. But DO NOT follow his last bit of advice. It’s morally questionable.

And here’s a bonus must-view that will ignite your passion for the apostrophe.

Filed under Business Writing, Marketing Tagged with apostrophe, Business Writing, grammar, Marketing, Small Business

The Greatest Sales Lead Source You Never Knew You Had

June 30, 2011 1 Comment

Mark Fidelman at Mindtouch says,

Ask Dean Onishi at RightScale what their number one sales lead source is for their products and he’ll tell you it’s their technical documentation support site. That’s right, tech docs.

Doesn’t surprise me at all. Technical documents have great potential to be powerful sales and marketing tools, but they typically get overlooked as something you need to have that nobody will read. If that’s your view, then your materials won’t do a thing for you. In fact, they might actually hurt your marketing efforts.

On the other hand, technical media, when it’s done right, can excite your customers while showing them in a fun way how to use your product. Yes, I used “excite” and “fun” to describe technical documents. No, I don’t have a fever.

Here’s a few companies that believe in the power of their technical media:

Each of these companies uses technical media in a different way, but they all understand the marketing and sales potential, and they’re capitalizing on it very well. And this is just a glimpse of the possibilities.

So let’s look at what these companies have done, and what you can do to increase the power of your marketing with technical materials.

Easy to Use

I can’t overstate this point: If your user guides are hard to use, your product will seem hard to use, and your customer will get frustrated and blame your company. But if your user guides are simple and easy, then your product will seem that much more usable and enjoyable, and your company will appear customer-oriented.

The example materials above are all very easy to use—some of them just require one button click! Even HTC’s more traditional PDF manual is impressive—it’s easy to read and understand, it’s well organized, and the illustrations are simple and clear.

Professional & Authoritative

If you’re going to put your company’s name on something—on anything—it had better live up to the company’s name. Everything your customer sees will influence their opinion of your company. That includes your documentation. People are so used to seeing bad user guides, when they see one that’s truly well done, they notice it.

So make sure your materials look professional and present themselves authoritatively. Not autocratically, but authoritatively. Definitive, reliable, unequivocal. When your materials look professional, your product will look professional and your company will be seen as a thought-leader.

Compelling

There’s something compelling about each of the examples above. Samsung’s guide is interactive; Nerf uses video to entertain and teach; HTC uses beautiful images and lots of white space to draw you in; Adobe’s site is exceptionally designed and looks high-tech. In each case, you’re drawn in to use the media—it makes you want to use it. And if you get interested in the tech doc, you get interested in the product. And that’s great marketing.

If you want compelling materials, start with basic graphic design principles: alignment, space, color, typography, etc. Use high-quality images and clean lines. Design with your customer in mind: are you marketing to teenage girls, artsy frat boys at Ivy League schools, or mid-career professionals aiming for the next level? Make sure your materials will appeal to the right audience.

Branded

Never let your customer forget who it is they’re impressed with. If they’re a potential customer doing product research, they’ll probably see your competitors’ materials too. And if they’re impressed with your materials and your product, but they forget it’s your product, what’s going to happen?

Instead, make sure you integrate your logo, your colors, your motto—everything that identifies the material and product as yours. Don’t go overboard—you don’t want to sacrifice the other principles—but make it clear whose product it is they’re reading about.

Public

Of course, you can’t market a product or make a sale if you don’t spread the word. Each of the companies above has made their materials public and easy to access. Nerf and Adobe, in particular, have videos on YouTube as well as their own sites, which maximizes their broadcasting reach.

Broadcast your technical media! Take advantage of the social sites your company already uses like YouTube, Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn to get your user guides out there.

Intext Writing Delivers Exceptional Technical Media

Intext Writing has everything you need for creating impressive technical media. By combining design principles, the latest tools, and progressive methodologies, we can make your materials authoritative and compelling. Contact us to start your new project today!

Have anything to add? What do you think makes technical documents powerful marketing and sales tools?

Photo credit: Michael Hashizume

Filed under Marketing, Technical Writing Tagged with Adobe, HTC, Marketing, Nerf, sales, Samsung, technical documents, technical media

How Not to Improve Your Product Design

May 2, 2011 1 Comment

Toothpaste instructions are fairly simple:

“For best results, squeeze tube from the bottom and flatten as you go up.”

For years, this worked fine—it made sense, I got it, I could follow it (although TedVanWhy can’t figure out why on earth you need to be told how to squeeze toothpaste in the first place). But what happens when you change your design, but not your instructions?

Now how do you flatten as you go up? And how will doing it produce “best results”? This caused my eight-year-old some mild grief the other night and he’s still waiting for a satisfying answer. I’m still wondering why no one at these toothpaste companies is sufficiently embarrassed by their product to change their labels.

When you improve the design of your product, don’t forget to improve your materials. Otherwise your business looks sloppy and dim-witted, and your customer just gets frustrated.

And that doesn’t sound like much of an improvement at all.

Photo credit: Petter Duvander

Filed under Small Business Tagged with instructions, labels, product design

This Is What I Love

April 25, 2011 Leave a comment

Whenever I start working with a new client, I’m always reminded how unusual it is to love doing technical writing. I mean, the very reason I get hired somewhere is because no one else wants to do my job! (Or, no one else can do it—which of course means they won’t want to do it.)

But I really love it.

All Work and All Play

I love to play. Every Saturday I’m on the field for a couple hours playing ultimate frisbee. I play in the sun, the rain, the snow. I play until I can hardly walk or breathe. I play hard—because what’s the point, otherwise?

A new documentation project is a bit like my Saturdays. I get a new piece of software (or a device) to document and it’s like unwrapping a new toy—something to play with. And documenting it is like keeping a journal about playtime. I take my play seriously, and my work shows it.

For the Love of Words

Ralphie Parker knew how to document a product.

(click here if you can’t see the video)

Here’s Ralphie’s complete theme:

“What I want for Christmas. What I want for Christmas is a Red Ryder BB gun with a compass in the stock and this thing which tells time. (Wow, that’s great.) I think that everybody should have a Red Ryder BB gun. They’re very good for Christmas. I don’t think that a football’s a very good Christmas present.”

There’s a love for the beauty of words in that theme. Did you catch it? Ralphie pauses after the first sentence to revel in the beauty of the text: “Wow, that’s great.”

There are those of us who love the beauty of crisp, clear text. When the economy of words and clarity of a message combine, it’s like poetry. And to take a jumbled mess of text and craft something beautiful from it is like sculpting a piece of art.

Okay, so maybe I’m getting a bit carried away. But it’s true that I find a real joy in creating beautiful content. After all, it makes up a third of my philosophy of writing.

Photo credit: QThomas Bower

Filed under Technical Writing Tagged with freelance writing, Technical Writing

Using the iPad at Work?

April 18, 2011 5 Comments

I’ve been thinking about the iPad a lot lately, and even got to try one out for the first time a few days ago. It was a lot of fun to play with, but I’ve never been able to get past the fact that it doesn’t seem good for anything other than entertainment. So you can play Angry Birds on it or watch Netflix or download music from iTunes. I can do all that and more with the devices I’ve already got. Where’s the added value? How can it help me in business?

Then I came across this article in the WSJ. It seems there are businesses that are buying up iPads for professional use. The article cites law firms and car dealerships, but not consultants, so it’s got me intrigued but not sold (yet).

So I thought I’d ask you: Do you use the iPad in your work, and if so, how?

Photo credit: Mike Licht

Filed under Small Business Tagged with business, iPad, technology

Latest Launch: Ambrose Solutions

April 11, 2011 Leave a comment

Want to see a great website? Check out Amrose Solutions. They were looking to rebrand their company and hired one of Ann Arbor’s most exciting small businesses, The Whole Brain Group, to build the site for them. WBG contracted Intext Writing to create the content.

That’s right, Intext Writing does website content too. Check it out – we think it’s pretty exceptional stuff.

At the start of the project, I met face-to-face with Vicky and John from Ambrose Solutions and got to know them and their company. I asked a lot of questions, listened to their stories, and learned about what they’re most proud of. The result is a website that “sounds” like Ambrose – it reflects their unique personality and it has their voice.

Most small businesses have websites that sound more like everyone else in their industry. If your website needs a new voice, send Intext Writing an email. We’ll reply quickly to help you decide if we’re the solution for you.

And by the way, if your whole website needs an overhaul, you can’t go wrong with The Whole Brain Group. They’re one of my favorite clients, and they were the first to help Intext Writing save the world.

Filed under Web Content Tagged with Ambrose Solutions, The Whole Brain Group, web content

But Is It Human?

April 4, 2011 5 Comments

I’ve just started using Help and Manual to create online help projects (although it does more than that). Hopefully, I’ll have a review up soon.

Anyway, as I was digging around in their user help I came across this bit of advice:

Important warning:

Don’t try to use the Width: and Height: settings to scale your video, these options are only for setting the correct original size! If you scale with these settings quality will be very poor (i.e. really, really, really bad), particularly in Flash video and animation files.

Who says a user guide can’t have personality? I love it! It actually made me laugh out loud. When you’ve got a customer trying to grasp an entirely new system, show them you’re human too. They’ll love your product even more – and your company, too!

Photo credit: Sputnikco.com

Filed under Technical Writing Tagged with Help & Manual, help authoring tool, humor, Technical Writing

← Older posts

Newer posts →

Freelance Technical Writing Services | Web Writing Services