Documentation

100 Power Writing Tips for 2011

Posted by Dennis Crane on December 11, 2010 at 5:27 pm

The virtual e-book cover was made with True Boxshot software “Every time someone reads your document and they walk away with a greater understanding of the concept or analysis at hand, you are taking steps to becoming an established and recognized writer.” This is a quote from new e-book “100 Power Writing Tips for 2011” [...]

Agile technical writing – New opportunities for user assitance

Posted by Dennis Crane on October 22, 2010 at 4:12 pm

With agile methodology applied, organization can lower its expenses by producing cost-effective documentation. Because of incremental way of delivering help files, the whole help rarely has to be fully rearranged. Everything is done practically on the fly. Read full article: Agile Technical Writing Basics

What Do User Assistance Professionals Expect From Help Authoring Tools

Posted by Dennis Crane on September 23, 2010 at 5:17 pm
Dr.Explain at UA Europe 2010 Conference

Last week Indigo Byte Systems’ team visited UA Europe 2010 – The Conference for Software User Assistance Professionals that took part in Stockholm. The conference was produced by Matthew Ellison Consulting in association with Writers UA. This year our company is a Gold Sponsor of UA Europe 2010. On the conference’s exhibition we introduced our [...]

Insert keyboard key images into your help manuals and documentation

Posted by Dennis Crane on March 23, 2010 at 6:03 pm
ctrl_key.png

There are two common ways to describe a sequence of key pressings in your software help documentation: The first one is like this Press Ctrl+Shift+F to flag the record. The second one is like this + + = Flag the record If you prefer the second approach then these two resources will be helpful to [...]

The Conference: Better User Experience Through Better User Assistance

Posted by Dennis Crane on January 26, 2010 at 6:08 am
The Conference for Software User Assistance

This year our Dr.Explain help tool team is proud to be a sponsor of The Conference for Software User Assistance by WritersUA. The focus of the Conference for Software User Assistance is on developing the best possible user experience for all types of software applications through well-designed interfaces and helpful and accessible support information. The [...]

Is your on-line help manual SEO friendly?

Posted by Dennis Crane on October 5, 2009 at 5:17 am

Recently, we’ve discovered that up to 40% of the Dr.Explain website’s organic (non-paid) traffic that comes from search engines do actually land on pages of our on-line manual. This proves that on-line documentation is not only a helpful tool for existing customers and users. It’s a good marketing and sales tool as well. If you [...]

Collective Intelligence: a new concept of WEB 3.0 from Balam J. Abello

Posted by Dennis Crane on September 21, 2009 at 4:46 am
Balam J. Abello

Being a software vendor is a fantastic job. Meeting interesting people with out-of-the-box vision is one of the most attractive sides of my job. Today, I’m happy to introduce you an interview with Balam J. Abello. Balam is a talented engineer, futurist, writer, and IT consultant with many years of extensive experience in such revolutionary [...]

Going to Write Another E-book?

Posted by Dennis Crane on September 15, 2009 at 9:47 am

A professional friend of mine, technical writer Keith Johnson, offered me an opportunity to write a guest post for his excellent Great Documents – technical writing blog. During several chat sessions with Keith we were discussing various questions of collaboration, social networking, information exchange and sharing. This discussion convinced me to summarize my thoughts about [...]

Does the good documentation increase the load of technical support?

Posted by Dennis Crane on May 14, 2009 at 8:51 am

Scott, an ISV-entrepreneur, on BoS forum has recently complained that since their company had reached a new level of technical documentation the number of service requests grew up. That’s an interesting effect! Scott wrote: Two reasons for this, based on feedback from customers seeking support: 1. Documentation is now so comprehensive that it is intimidating. [...]

Two useful services for making voice-over for screencast or video

Posted by Dennis Crane on May 7, 2009 at 4:27 am

Recently, we needed a presentational video for an affiliated service that allows health conscious people to track their diabetes, blood pressure, or body weight records and to share the results. The main difficulty of the project was a voice-over for the video. We needed a clear, calm and native English speech but there are no [...]