PowerPoint Presentation

A little bit about myself:

My blog. I simply like writing about my experiences. Helps me think things through and better understand, improve etc.- Badgeville. Working for a gamification company.

This presentation is unique even though Ive given it a couple of times now. Its unique because you participate. You dont just sit there. You come up with solutions to some of the most challenging problems in tech comm. Were going to tackle them tonight and come up with real solutions.

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Really I think we should have evolved help content to the point that users pretty much love it. Technical writers should be seen and welcomed with open arms. If weve been writing help for the past 60 years, this is what the evolution should look like.

Instead, we constantly are greeted with responses like, Oh, youre the guy who writes the manual, and people dont really see us with the same value.2

It seems like content takes a backseat in most tech comm conferences, events, webinars, and other things. People become passionate about the tools. They become DITA-ites, or Robohelp-ites. They become publishing experts, and they relish this knowledge. But when it comes to creating content, they dont have the same passion.

But I dont think users care much about the tools and the publishing process as much as the content itself. Whenever I hear feedback from users, its almost always about the content, not the design or anything else. Thats why in this presentation I want to focus on the content.3

I 5

Adobe Pen Tool

Single-page doc example (CoreOS)

What do you call this?

Framesets in Google

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Really I think we should have evolved help content to the point that users pretty much love it. Technical writers should be seen and welcomed with open arms. If weve been writing help for the past 60 years, this is what the evolution should look like.

Instead, we constantly are greeted with responses like, Oh, youre the guy who writes the manual, and people dont really see us with the same value.41