The edc blog
“I don’t know where to start…” : DITA topics as a writing guide
The empty page: a horror story in three words As I mentioned in my post about continuous delivery, my goal as a tech writer is to get as many SMEs writing their own documentation as I can. Getting people curious about documentation isn’t that hard, usually subject...
The impact of Agile vs waterfall development on user help
There are many, many advantages to using Agile development and Continuous Delivery when you develop software. I’m not going to go too deep into the perks for developers and managers since many people have already done so much better than I ever could. No, I am going...
Help, my users don’t read the software user help !
Ah, the one issue all tech writers must contend with: you worked hard, hunted down developers to find out about all the important features you need to document, tied subject matter experts to a chair until they gave you answers to your questions, lovingly crafted...
Create a Context Strategy
Planning content for embedded software help requires more than a content strategy; you need a context strategy. Plan the entire user experience, taking into account the context of users. Let’s look at how we create a context strategy at edc. We’ll use a real software...
Contextual information for software
There are a lot of variations in methods and terminology based on which technology does what, and it has evolved a lot. We talk about online help, context-sensitive help, contextualised help, targeted help, onboarding help, and many others. Some of the definitions are...
Personas: mapping user experience for information delivery
What are personas? A persona is a representation of a type of customer. Personas answer the question, “Who are we designing for?” and they help to align strategy and goals to specific user groups.You can begin by compiling everything you know about your customers and...
Intelligent Information: contextualization & user experience
In the core definition of Information 4.0, information is molecular, autonomous and profiled. It is also ubiquitous in that it can be present everywhere or anywhere. Contextualization & user experience based on Information 4.0 principles are at the core of our...
Is the Era of Big Doc Over?
At TECH’advantage, we are software editors in the oil and gas industry. When we talk about Big Doc in this article we mean user-oriented documentation. This article is based on our experience over several decades. Our orientations driven in conjunction with our...
How to Create a Content Strategy that Drives Traffic
Developing a content strategy is more than just organizing your content into categories. Your content strategy for online help should help users find the information they need. And that's why keywords are important, even in your content strategy. Today, users are...
