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Your customer isn’t an engineer (unless your customer really is an engineer!). She doesn’t have your background knowledge, talk like you, think like you, or look at your product the way you do. She doesn’t know what a Phidget is or why your algorithms are better than the competition’s. She couldn’t tell the difference between a resistor and a capacitor if you held a gun to her head.

And she shouldn’t have to.

Your job is to make sure it’s easy for her to boil an egg. And that means you need to forget everything you know as an engineer, programmer, analyst, or guru, and assume the identity of your customer. Create technical resources (and a product!) that will make it easy for your customer to use and to relate to. It’s a very incarnational activity if you think about it . . . but that’s another holiday.

This can be a pretty tough task – to forget everything you know as an expert and assume the identity of an outsider – but it’s a critical one, and absolutely necessary. Otherwise, you create confusion and frustration for your customers, increase tech support costs, and risk alienating your most passionate users.

For some companies, there’s no one on staff with the time or skill set to create user-friendly resources. If you’re one of those companies, you may want to consider hiring a freelance technical writer. Freelance tech writers have both the technical experience to partner competently with you and the outsider’s perspective to relate to your customers. They also free up your engineers to do what they do best.

Or you can grit your teeth and follow Peppermint Patty’s example. But if you do, better be prepared to clean up a bunch of broken eggs.

Andy Sernovitz

“Only type what you would say out loud.”

I recently conducted a writing workshop for a group of well-educated professionals. The very reason some of them needed the workshop was because they were typing what they would say out loud.

Andy’s point was that your writing should sound like a real human wrote it, and his advice to read your content aloud to another person is excellent. But please don’t type what you would say out loud. Otherwise, the world will be (more) populated with content that reads like this:

“So the PM gave that one project with the Detroit group to Steve and I and we’re really excited about some of the stuff they’re doing with it. It’s really cool how this project is gonna be used when it’s all done and they’re all up and running and everything, you know?”

Whatever you do, don’t write like you talk! Even the most educated of us shouldn’t do it. Everyone has habits and speech patterns that sound fine when they are spoken but look ignorant or just plain weird in writing.

At the same time, you should never type what you wouldn’t say aloud either. I think this is where Andy was going with his point. If it sounds wooden or unnatural when spoken, it shouldn’t be written either. So follow half of Andy’s advice: read your content aloud before you click the Submit button. But please, don’t type what you would say out loud.

Photo credit: Travis Hornung

This is the eighth in a series of posts that discuss Dieter Rams’s 10 principles of good design and why good design is necessary for your content. In this series we explore each of the principles and what it means for content writing and technical writing.

Today we look at the seventh principle of good design:

Good design 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.

The world of technical communication has never been very trendy. There are few fads or fashions in the industry, and that’s a good thing. The content we produce shouldn’t appear dated, even years later. Technology will continue to open up new possibilities, and technical writers should adopt new technologies (as long as they help us accomplish our goals), but the content we produce today shouldn’t look kitschy or corny in a couple years.

That’s not to say the tech comm world hasn’t made mistakes. Witness Clippy, Microsoft’s attempt at personalizing their help system. The intention was noble and good, but the application was goofy (and annoying), and today it appears dated and silly.

The trick is to recognize something as trendy before it’s passé. That’s not easy to do, but here’s a few things to watch for:

Color. It seems each decade has its own color wheel. The ‘70s loved avocado green and squash yellow, the 80s were pretty in pink, and the 90s couldn’t get enough of teal and purple. Avoid trendy color combinations.

New Technology. New technology can let you do some cool stuff with your content, but just because it’s there, doesn’t mean you need to use it. Take QR codes, for instance. They’ve just arrived on the scene, but already some are saying that the pixelated Rorschach’s days are numbered.

Popular Designs. Watch out for visual elements that everyone’s using right now—in a couple years, it’ll look dated, and even now it might look a bit cliché. A couple years ago vector graphics became all the rage. Today I see speech bubble logos everywhere online. Photos of goldfish jumping out of a fishbowl are ubiquitous, too. Honestly, it’s gotten so bad, I’m now surprised whenever I see a business use that image—not because it’s a surprising image, but because it’s gotten so cliché.

Overused Fonts. Back in the late ‘90s and early ‘00s, when Microsoft Publisher was on fire and people were building their very first DIY websites, there came a whole new set of fonts that got used everywhere—especially Comic Sans MS and Papyrus. Man, were they cool! Well, now they’re kitschy and dated. Watch out for overused fonts. NOTE: The one typeface that everyone seems to love and never seems to become outdated is Helvetica. It just seems to be a classic.

Clip Art and Stock Images. Watch out for popular types of images that are common in clip art and stock photo sites. A hideously overused trope is a group of young, sharply-dressed professionals of mixed gender and race gathered around a laptop with a white background. Find something more original than that.

Trendiness isn’t a big issue for designing technical content, but these are areas you should consider. And, of course, watch out for Clippy. He smiles too much to be trusted.

Also in this series:

• The 10 Commandments for Designing Your Content
• What’s the Point of Innovation? [Good Design #2]
• How Companies Make Their Products Useless (And How to Avoid It) [Good Design #3]
• Why the iPad User Guide Matters [Good Design #4]
• Air Guitars and Keeping Loyal Customers [Good Design #5]
• Hey Content, Don’t Be That Guy [Good Design #6]
• Obi-Wan Kenobi: Content Writer for the Dark Side [Good Design #7]

Obi-Wan: Luke, you’re going to find that many of the truths we cling to depend greatly on our own point of view.

Tell that to your next disgruntled customer.

In our social media-driven economy, honesty is the big commodity. Being authentic, being trustworthy—it’s just how good business is done today. And your customers are highly attuned to cues that you can’t be trusted, whether it’s based on “a certain point of view” or simply not being dependable.

Honest, I Didn’t Know I Was Lying

Unfortunately, technical content is fertile ground for untruth. It’s not that we purposefully lie to our customers, but there are so many modifications during product development and documentation that it’s easy for changes to slip by unnoticed. That is, until your customers notice (and they will).

If you want to earn your customers’ trust, you need to make sure your content is honest—100% of the time.

This is the seventh in a series of posts that discuss Dieter Rams’s 10 principles of good design and why good design is necessary for your content. In this series we explore each of the principles and what it means for content writing and technical writing.

Today we look at the sixth principle of good design:

Good design 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.

I think this one is pretty self-explanatory. Be honest. Period. That doesn’t simply mean “don’t lie,” but promote truth. Make sure your content is truthful and don’t leave room for inaccuracy. Period.

For the content writer, it means that you don’t exaggerate or promise more than you can deliver. For the technical writer it means not only that but also writing accurate content.

How Then Shall We Design?

Of course, that’s easier said than done, isn’t it? So how do you make sure your content is accurate and truthful? Well, I’m glad you asked! Here are some thoughts:

Formalize your processes for documentation and product development. A formal, intentional process helps ensure that documentation gets updated at key milestones, and that the documentation process moves parallel to product development.

Create checkpoints. Who are your gate keepers? Make sure they can accurately check your documentation against the latest version of your product at key milestones.

Integrate documentation into your bug and enhancement tracking system. Whenever there’s a change that affects documentation, it should be entered into your bug tracking system to notify your writer. This way, every single change is accounted for.

Review the docs. Again. I guarantee you’ll catch at least one more thing to fix.

Good content design helps ensure that your content is honest. When you can say that your content is honest, without adding any qualifiers (I’m looking at you, Obi-Wan), you’ll win the trust of your customers.

Also in this series:

• The 10 Commandments for Designing Your Content
• What’s the Point of Innovation? [Good Design #2]
• How Companies Make Their Products Useless (And How to Avoid It) [Good Design #3]
• Why the iPad User Guide Matters [Good Design #4]
• Air Guitars and Keeping Loyal Customers [Good Design #5]
• Hey Content, Don’t Be That Guy [Good Design #6]

Internet Marketing Start to Finish, by Catherine Juon, Dunrie Greiling, and Catherine Buerkle, aims to provide some relief. Designed to outline “a breakthrough system for attracting more customers on the Internet,” the book lays out an online marketing strategy from beginning to end. It shows you how to gather and interpret data, plan and implement your marketing strategy, and evaluate and adjust your methods. Everything is covered, from search marketing to usability to CRM and analytics.

What I Like

The authors really know their stuff. They have over 48 years between them in Internet and marketing experience. Together they work as a team at Pure Visibility, a successful marketing firm in Ann Arbor, Michigan. (Full disclosure: I am acquainted with another person at Pure Visibility who did not author this book, and I’ve attended a workshop that they led.)

Internet Marketing lays out a complete, end-to-end strategy that is flexible enough to be adapted to businesses of all sizes and stripes. It includes tons of terrific resources and steps you through several processes in great detail. Case studies help illustrate concepts and an appendix shows a fictional company’s implementation of the concepts that are discussed throughout the book.

The authors have created a resource that is targeted toward veterans as well as beginners who haven’t a clue how to start an online campaign. No matter what your experience in online marketing, Internet Marketing can be a great resource.

What I Don’t Like

However, it has its difficulties as well. Although it can be a great resource for anyone at any level, its depth of information can also be pretty overwhelming for beginners. Ideally, I’d like to see this book split into two: one that serves as an introduction to online marketing, and another that digs deeper into the nitty gritty details. Internet Marketing does both, which may occasionally alienate beginners just looking for the basics.

The quality of writing also leaves something to be desired. The style is uneven at times (probably the result of a team effort) and occasionally unclear. The first two chapters are downright confusing due to poor organization and need of an editor; but because they serve as introductory material, the rest of the book is still a great resource. I recommend giving the first two chapters a quick read and moving on to the meat of the book in chapter 3 and following. Most of the writing issues can be easily resolved by a solid copy editor, and I look forward to hearing of a second edition one day.

What I Recommend

Internet Marketing Start to Finish is written by experts in online marketing, not in manuscript editing—they provide an excellent resource for those who want to learn basic Internet marketing concepts as well as in-depth strategy. Readers should be prepared for a book that isn’t the easiest to read, but it can serve as an indespensible tool for building a complete, end-to-end online marketing strategy for your business.

Photo credit: Carrington Vanston

You know how there’s always That Guy at the party? He’s the guy without a sense of personal space who keeps butting into other people’s conversations and derailing them with slightly inappropriate stories and way too much personal information. Well, I hate to break it to you, but your content may be That Guy.

We want our content to get noticed, but it shouldn’t ever butt in where it doesn’t belong. Do we have a good understanding of where our content doesn’t belong? No one likes the guy at the party who keeps butting into other people’s conversations, and your users resent it when your content is That Guy, too.

This is the sixth in a series of posts that discuss Dieter Rams’s 10 principles of good design and why good design is necessary for your content. In this series we explore each of the principles and what it means for content writing and technical writing.

Today we look at the fifth principle of good design:

Good design 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.

Who, Me Obtrusive?

What does it mean for content to be unobtrusive? I think Dieter Rams meant that design shouldn’t be so decorative that it gets in the way of usability. That’s valuable, but I don’t think it’s often an issue for  technical content. So what does it mean for technical content to be obtrusive? Obtrusive content:

• Butts in where it isn’t wanted. This third wheel pops up (literally) out of nowhere and inserts itself where it wasn’t invited. It’s distracting, annoying, and sometimes jarring. Offenders: tips of the day, splash screens, pop-ups, Windows confirmation dialogs.
• Interrupts your work. Just when you start finding your groove, this content interrupts what you’re doing and redirects you through several pages or links you didn’t want to go to. Your work is crawling along and you’ve wasted a chunk of the day. Offenders: any website or help system that makes you click all over the place to find the information you need.
• Doesn’t understand personal space. Garish content like this tends to yell in all caps and throw itself in your face with bold highlighted text. It’s often very animated, perhaps because it’s afraid if it gives you any breathing room you’ll take off. Which you will. Offenders: long form sales sheets, MySpace, flashing ads.
• Doesn’t know when to shut up. Like the guy you hate asking open-ended questions to, this content just keeps going and going. Guilty of information dumping, or just plain wordy, the monologue never seems to end. Offenders: text-heavy websites, padded business reports.

Unobtrusive content is functional, but never gets in the way. It’s a tool that’s there when you need it while giving you room to do what you want. You might not even notice it unless you look for it. It’s restrained, helpful, and never self-seeking.

Respecting Personal Space Where There Is No Space

There’s one context when it’s especially critical to keep your content unobtrusive: mobile apps. These little guys are tricky—apps can vary significantly from one to the other, which means you won’t always know what to expect. So you often need some level of instruction to get started, or labels for elements on the interface. Sometimes, you need even more than just basic information. But the real estate on a mobile device is so tiny, it doesn’t take much for your content to get in the way.

Here’s a few examples of using content in a mobile app (click to view full size):

Google Voice Search (left) gives you usage examples that you can view by scrolling horizontally, or you can tap to watch a video in a separate web browser. SoundHound (center) displays tooltips that you can show or hide (although notice the ugly ad above, which is a bit obtrusive). Quickoffice’s help content (right) fails the unobtrusiveness test: The app requires a minimum of five taps before you reach the actual help files. It may be tucked out of the way, but its demands on my effort are quite obtrusive.

How Then Shall We Design?

Make sure you design your content so that it doesn’t get in the way. It should be readily available and easily accessible, but never intrude or take the user away from his or her workflow. Obtrusive content isn’t just annoying, it’s actually a bit unhelpful. Companies that design their content to be unobtrusive create a more rewarding user experience for their customers.

Also in this series:

• The 10 Commandments for Designing Your Content
• What’s the Point of Innovation? [Good Design #2]
• How Companies Make Their Products Useless (And How to Avoid It) [Good Design #3]
• Why the iPad User Guide Matters [Good Design #4]
• Air Guitars and Keeping Loyal Customers [Good Design #5]

He had fun with this Air Guitar, but the instructions were nearly indecipherable. The content itself wasn’t bad (although it really wasn’t good, either). In fact, although the content itself was pretty clear, it took great effort to undertstand the instructions. The culprit was poor design—it hindered the content. Like nonverbal cues in spoken dialog, design carries great responsibility for communicating the written word.

This is the fifth in a series of posts that discuss Dieter Rams’s 10 principles of good design and why good design is necessary for your content. In this series we explore each of the principles and what it means for content writing and technical writing.

Today we look at the fourth principle of good design:

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

At first, this principle seems like a no-brainer. Of course well-designed content should make a product understandable—that’s what it’s there for! But in our case, the product we’re designing is the content itself. Good content design makes your content understandable. This means you can’t rely on your words alone to communicate—effective writing goes far beyond your choice of words.

Confuse Them and Lose Them

Here’s a copy of the Air Guitar instructions (click to expand). These instructions are on a single sheet of paper, a little smaller than standard U.S. letter size. Don’t ask me why they refused to use the reverse side.

Here’s just a few design flaws that make the content difficult to understand:

• The font size looks like it ranges from 2 to 8 points. Way too small! And the size varies without apparent reason (except to fit it all on one page?).
• There’s so much crowding of text that the eye gets stressed just glancing at it.
• The black triangles with numbers don’t make any sense. Do they indicate steps? Sections?
• The images aren’t bad, but the largest one at the top is too small to read clearly.
• There’s no sense of flow from one section to another—what order should I read these instructions in? Or is that what the black triangles are for?

I could go on, but you get the idea.

If the Air Guitar were my toy, I would have taken one quick glance at the instructions and tossed them out. Luckily, it’s an easy toy to figure out without a user guide, but what if it weren’t? In that case, I might give up and return the product for a refund. Or I might go online and search for help from other users, but I wouldn’t look for help from the company.

In fact, that’s exactly what millions of users do every day. Rather than go to the company for help, customers often seek out other users. This isn’t necessarily a bad thing, but when your documentation is so poorly designed that it drives your customers away, you’ve got a problem. Your customers don’t trust you, or they don’t want to bother with you.

It’s also common for customers to return items simply because they couldn’t figure out how to use the products, and that’s costly to your business.

On the other hand, if you provide well-designed content that’s easy to understand, you’ll boost customer loyalty and trust. Supplement your documentation with  user feedback and contributions, and you’ve created a support community of excited users and loyal customers—and you cut down on your own support costs. Talk about a win-win solution!

Win-Win-Win

There’s a marketing benefit to good design, too. Smart companies are realizing the tremendous value of designing their technical documents to impress customers and give the best user experiences possible. Some are even beginning to use their user guides as marketing materials—something I’ve advocated several times (including here and here).

When you give your user guides this kind of priority, you empower your customers to get to know your product more fully, even before they buy. It’s a rewarding experience for your customers, and if the technical documentation is designed well, it also serves as effective marketing material.

How Then Shall We Design?

Remember, good design isn’t the same as a slick layout or cool graphics. You can have a cool looking document but still have poorly designed content. Good design is anything that makes your content understandable. When producing content, keep these four areas in consideration:

1. Organization. Not just a lack of disorganization, but the proper organization. Should the content be organized hierarchically or have a flat structure? What should the user see first? Can the user find information easily? Are topics organized in a way that makes sense and is usable?
2. Layout. Robin Williams uses for basic principles for designing layout: color, repetition, alignment, proximity. I highly recommend her book, The Non-Designer’s Design Book. In addition, consider your typeface, and use bullets and numbering in a consistent manner.
3. Media. Use images or videos to break up the monotony of text, to make instructions easier to understand, and to keep readers’ interest. Don’t overuse media, and only use images or video if you can justify their usefulness. If it doesn’t help improve understanding, don’t use it.
4. Simplicity. The more complex you get, the easier it is to lose your users. Simple design enhances the content, but complex design can often interfere with the message.

The design of your content is a big deal. Without giving it the proper attention, you can easily create content that is hard to understand and causes your customers to become frustrated. Frustrated customers will abandon you by returning your product or turning to others for help. Either way, you lose their trust and loyalty. Be sure your content strengthens customer loyalty by taking the time to design every piece of content.

Don’t have the time to devote to designing your content? Talk to us! We can help you create compelling, authoritative content your customers will love.

Also in this series:

• The 10 Commandments for Designing Your Content
• What’s the Point of Innovation? [Good Design #2]
• How Companies Make Their Products Useless (And How to Avoid It) [Good Design #3]
• Why the iPad User Guide Matters [Good Design #4]

Photo Credit: Elmo H. Love

Scott says:

When organizations showcase their technical communication products on the web, in the way that Autodesk and ExactTarget do today, they experience many benefits, including deep knowledge about their customers that allow them to make valuable incremental improvements to the customer experience.

Organizations like iFixit.com are taking that approach a few steps further by creating technical documentation that is designed to sell products.

Intext Writing has been serious about this all along. When you hire a technical writer to create your content, you harm your business if that content isn’t designed to sell and doesn’t improve customer experience.

Officially, this is an aside to our Good Design series, but Scott’s article is a great example of the importance of good design in content writing. We’ll pick up the series again shortly.

This is the fourth in a series of posts that discuss Dieter Rams’s 10 principles of good design and why good design is necessary for your content. In this series we explore each of the principles and what it means for content writing and technical writing.

Today we look at the third principle of good design:

Good design 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.

Your Brand Depends on Aesthetics

This principle applies as much to your content and technical documents as it does to your product. Technical documentation in particular is often seen as the ugly stepchild of product development, and so of course it ends up looking ugly. But this has ramifications. It affects how your customers view the product and your company.

Everything your customer sees will influence his or her opinion of your company. If your content is ugly, it sends a message about your company itself. Even if your customers never take the time to read the content, they’ll see it. And a quick glance is enough to shape their opinions.

Need more reasons to create aesthetic content? Here are three more:

• We trust what is aesthetic. Aesthetic designs are seen as more trustworthy. Again, think of Apple’s products. Psychology supports this, too—we trust beautiful people more easily than homely people. Companies that are trusted are also seen as thought leaders. So if you want to gain trust, make all of your content aesthetic.
• We like what is aesthetic. Humans are naturally attracted to beauty. We’re designed to seek it out. So when your content is aesthetic, your customers will like it. They’ll enjoy seeing it, and they’ll be more likely to use it. They will also be more likely to associate their enjoyment of the content with their opinion of your company. Don’t miss this point: your customers’ opinion of your content will influence their opinion of your company. Message boards are stuffed with users who resent companies for their crappy manuals. If you want your customers to love your company, give them reasons to love your content as well.
• We remember and understand what is aesthetic. Aesthetic content inherently makes more sense than ugly content. And because aesthetic content is more likeable, they will spend more time viewing it, which leads to greater retention and understanding.

A Word of Caution

Don’t fall in love with aesthetics for their own sake. Good design is built on functionality. Beautiful content ceases to be well designed when its aesthetics get in the way of its usability.

How Then Shall We Design?

Often, little changes can make a big difference. A good starting place is the book The Non-Designer’s Design Book  by Robin Williams. If your content needs more than just a tweak here and there, or if you want an aesthetic design that’s impressive and comprehensive, it can create a drain on your resources—especially during the learning curve phase. Evaluate your resources before you begin the project.

Many of our clients come to us looking for exceptional writing that is also visually appealing. Their past content has been anything from unremarkable to embarrassing and they want their materials to reflect their company’s leadership in the industry. These clients continue to use Intext Writing for authoritative and compelling content  that they can proudly give to customers, investors, and partners.

Whether your materials just need a bit of tweaking or an overhaul from a professional content writer, make sure they’re well designed and aesthetic. The impact on your customers will be worth it!

Also in this series:

• The 10 Commandments for Designing Your Content
• What’s the Point of Innovation?
• How Companies Make Their Products Useless (And How to Avoid It)

Photo credit: The D34n

Sometime when you need a good laugh, do a Google search for “worst instructions ever” and see what turns up. Among the bounty of hilarious posts and scathing reviews (note that: it’s not just your product that’s being reviewed too!) is a common theme: unusable instructions make a product unusable.

Most of the instructions in my Google search were bad because a blind monkey translated them into something resembling English, but often the culprit is bad content design.

This is the third in a series of posts that discuss Dieter Rams’s 10 principles of good design and why good design is important for content writing. In this series we explore each of the principles and what it means for content writing and technical writing.

Today we look at the second principle of good design:

Good design 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.

Make It Useful, or Don’t Make It

Technical writing and content writing have a double purpose: they’ve got to emphasize the usefulness of the product, and the content itself must be useful. It’s not enough to have accurate content or even well-written content—good design is critical to usefulness.

My six-year-old’s birthday was a real pain for me this year. The in-laws gave him some Transformers^TM that were approved for ages 5+, which was probably true if that means that a kindergartener won’t to try to eat the toy or flush it down the toilet. But if it means that the kid should be able to transform it from a car to a robot, then you can just forget it. Besides the fact that the toy’s parts had to be smashed into place (bad product design), the instructions were so hideous, they were incomprehensible. Were they complete? Yes, I believe so. Were they accurate? From what I could tell, probably. But the content was so poorly designed that it made the toy useless. The toy sits, unplayed with since his birthday, in a corner of my son’s closet. Good content, without good design, is no good. Overlook content design, and you could do real harm to your product’s usability!

That’s a pretty extreme example, but I hope you get the point. The Transformer was a difficult toy to begin with, but if the content had been designed well, my son could have enjoyed a sub-par product and we would have had a much better opinion of the manufacturer. What a difference good design can make!

How Then Shall We Design?

To design good content that will enhance a product’s (and the content’s) usefulness, ask questions about what will make the content more usable. Here are a few questions to ask as you’re designing your content:

1. What format will be most usable for the customer? PDF/print? Online help? Wiki? FAQs on website? Tool tips only? Video/animation?
2. How should I structure the content so that information is easy to find?
3. Illustrations: how many? How large? Should I use photos, screenshots, illustrations, or CAD? Where should images be placed on the page? Should I use callouts? If so, what kind of style?
4. Would video add value?
5. What kind of writing style is appropriate?

Also in this series:

• The 10 Commandments for Designing Your Content
• What’s the Point of Innovation? [Good Design #2]