Back to the Future – Simplified Technical English
For many years I’ve regarded Simplified Technical English as an outdated legacy from the Aerospace industry. But that opinion has changed radically in the last few weeks and I’m becoming a big fan.
Six online help tips
This article gives tips for online help that goes beyond the critical writing skills. It considers issues such as user contribution, interaction, responsive design and software integration.
MadCap Flare. A few of my favourite things.
Here at Armada Technical Witers our technical authoring team use a wide variety of applications to create documentation and we feel it is important to keep our skills updated. Earlier this week I completed a refresher course on MadCap Flare
Case Study: Online Help using RoboHelp
At Armada we are very proud of our success rate in winning new business. Read our case study on a client requiring an online help solution.
Case study – single source user assistance
Our client, Staffcare, developed a flexible software solution (also called Staffcare) for managing organisation’s HR, benefits and payroll data. Armada was commissioned to create a full user documentation set for System Administrators comprised of two formats: web-enabled online help PDF user
Technical author revolution
New software that creates documentation in all formats at the press of a button. The single sourcing revolution is here.
MadCap Flare 11: First look review
So it is the time of year that all technical authors have been waiting for. MadCap have released a new version of Flare, number 11. I have to admit that this year I read the new features and I wasn’t
Index for today’s user. The evolution of the index.
So, you have written the perfect help guide. You have addressed and held your audience with concise, relevant documentation written in Plain English. Now you must build an index to ensure that users can find the help they need.
Does the page fold matter in online help?
On the online help courses I ran in the 1990s, one of the basic points I made was to design help so that users didn’t have to scroll down a page. Content below the page fold was never read. So
Making your online help successful
For many years I’ve been aware of the findings of the excellent paper ‘How People Read on the Web; The Eyetracking Evidence’ by Kara Pernice, Kathryn Whitenton and Jakob Nielsen. The study looked at how people read a web page