Software users get critical when confronted with an issue. There is also a good chance they will tell their friends they hate your software.

If you are a technical writer, the time when a customer can’t make head or tail of what you wrote is the best time to receive feedback. A technical writer’s challenge is to deliver the right information at the right time, without adding frustration.

Printed or PDF manuals have become obsolete, as users find it more appropriate to search for pinpoint tips. If a user is given a choice between browsing through 500+ pages of technical documentation and just posting a question in a support community, what do you think they will choose?

Our job as technical writers at 4PSA is to maintain the documentation for current products and develop user resources for the upcoming products. This basically means we write product guides, tutorials, knowledge base articles and more. But writing is not everything. We want all this content to reach its target, the user.

Team Effort

The world is made of consumers and contributors. Some people search for knowledge, while others share that knowledge.

Important contributors to documentation are not just the technical writers, but also the software developers, sales people, support engineers and users.

Feedback sessions and reviews increase the time until the product documentation is ready to be called relevant, useful and comprehensive. We have to use other tools at hand to speed up the process and structure conclusions of what is needed and what is not in product documentation. Nowadays, the user can reach and be reached through multiple channels. The user is a content consumer and a contributor as well.

Social networks, support community and Wikis provide the means for everybody to conciliate.

Social Networks

They are a good channel for creating engagement on product development news. In our particular case, social networks help deliver notifications that generate interaction with/between users. For example, our Facebook and Twitter accounts can instantly deliver notifications about new releases.

Support Community

The potential of having a direct link to customers is huge. Customer communities, like my.4psa.com, generate important feedback through tools such as suggestions and ideas.

Wikis

It is very easy to use Wikis for writing documentation. The real challenge lies in engaging readers to contribute to the documentation with relevant suggestions.

A Wiki reduces the time spent by a technical writer between editing content and publishing it to a matter of seconds. And on Wiki, publishing means going straight to the end-user’s browser, not to a forsaken PDF on a business site, nor in a Help file that only reaches the user when the application gets updated. The Wiki’s notification system can bring immediately the relevant content that the user has been waiting. Wiki is transparent and keeps track of revisions. This makes internal reviewing a lot easier as all members of the team can openly contribute.

The feedback we get on our Wiki helps us build smarter content.

What We Do

Technical communication resources are assigned for each product team. While internally we have been working for a lot of time on new documentation resources, the effort got public only with the VoipNow 3 release.

Because VoipNow has a web based interface, it is easy to link it with the relevant articles on the Wiki. A user in need for help will get to the relevant article on our Wiki. Supposing that this article is not as relevant as we assume, the user can comment or use the Feedback button to get more help.

In our Agile development process, technical writers create and update user documentation alongside with the software development. When a sprint is completed, the documentation is ready to ship as well.

But end user documentation is not everything. For example, right now we are working on more technical oriented documentation that primarily targets software developers. While VoipNow is a complex piece of software, this developer level documentation is an ever bigger challenge.

We hope that this article described a little bit our efforts.  Explaining a complicated thing to people can be challenging, therefore rewarding.