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For many years I’ve regarded Simplified Technical English as an outdated legacy from the Aerospace industry.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.
Nigel Platts is one of the founders of Armada and runs the technical authoring and e-Learning side of the company. He has been in the technical authoring and training industry for over 30 years and has seen many trends and changes during that period.
Although mainly involved in project work, Nigel delivers a number of Armada's technical authoring training courses.
Plain English: 5 Top Tips for Business Writing
Good writing skills using Plain English are a core business skill. People that write well at work are good communicators. On the whole, good writers have credibility at work, they get promoted and they get salary increases. My Plain English 1
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.
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
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