The terrible tale of Alice the tech writer

Alice would like to improve the manual.

But she has no first-hand data to work from. She makes her best guess on improvements to make.

A diligent and experienced writer, Alice calls contacts in technical support, QA and marketing to see if they have any end user feedback.

Eventually she hears back from all three saying they’ll get back to her in a few days.

She sends an email with a PDF for the draft version and asks the customer support and QA teams to review the relevant sections.

Still no word from her customer support and QA contacts on the user feedback they’ve promised.

Alice sends them a second gentle reminder.

The QA team returns their review draft with comments in the PDF, but they have forgotten to review some sections.

She never hears back from customer support. But who likes to review 200 pages of PDFs?

Alice is forced to finish the manual update without the benefit of user feedback she was really hoping for.

At the product team meeting, she learns that engineering made additional UI changes that affect the guide.

Because of batch publication process constraints, she cannot extend the deadline. No chance to incorporate the customer feedback or UI changes now.

She pulls up the guide she’s updating and it has lots of great feedback users wrote and sent directly from the reader interface.

Alice also reviews user analytics data. She notes the sections in the documentation that users refer to most often so she can focus on the most relevant topics.

One click and Alice lands in the relevant sections. She agrees the documentation could be enhanced. But there is also something else, users don’t understand the menu options on some screens. She forwards the input to engineering.

Engineering reports that they made some UI changes based on the input she forwarded. They send her new screenshots and she’s able to quickly rewrite those sections.

Alice quickly scans the installation and setup Personal Books she received from customer support and incorporates suggestions from their in-context notes.

Alice uploads the updated guide to Fluid Topics. Content is processed as soon as it arrives and is immediately published to the company online information hub with synchronous indexing.

Alice identifies PDFs and other unstructured documents that should also be indexed when searching for this documentation. These documents provide a new perspective and can be easily found and examined by users.