You’ve tamed your analytics! Now what?
In my last post, I talked about How you can make sense of your site analytics. But once you make sense of them, what can you do with them? Let’s say that you’ve applied that method and you can now tell...
View ArticleIf it’s not statistically significant, is it useful?
In all the product documentation projects I’ve worked on, a good feedback response rate to our help content has been about 3-4 binary (yes/no) feedback responses per 10,000 page views. That’s 0.03% to...
View ArticleReporting documentation feedback and keeping it real
In my previous post, If it’s not statistically significant, is it useful? (and every grad-school class I taught statistics), I talked about staying within the limits of your data. By that, I mean not...
View ArticleHow to not suffer the curse of knowledge
Wikipedia says that the curse of knowledge “is a cognitive bias that occurs when an individual, who is communicating with other individuals, assumes that they have the background knowledge to...
View ArticleProving and defending the value of technical writing, again
A couple of weeks ago, I responded to this post on LinkedIn in which Nick, the original poster, asked, as so many technical writers before him: Does anyone have data from their industry, demonstrating...
View ArticleWriting UI text—less is more, taken to the extreme
Less is more is a mantra frequently heard in technical writing. When applied to editing, this works out to be something like, “After writing, keep taking the words out until it stops making sense, then...
View ArticleDocumentation research requires more curiosity than money
Sure, money helps, but success doesn’t always correlate with dollars spent. Here are a couple of examples that come to mind from my experience. piClinic research My favorite research success story...
View ArticleTips for conducting documentation research on the cheap
In my previous post, I presented some experiences with testing and the resulting epiphanies. In this post, I talk more about the process I applied. The process is simple, yet that’s what makes it...
View ArticleA look at the past to see the future of technical writing
I review some examples of my earliest technical writing to see into the future. I'm afraid that, the more things change, the more they stay the same. The post A look at the past to see the future of...
View ArticleWhat did AI think of my recent article about AI?
AI reviews my last blog post about AI in technical writing and offers a couple of summaries The post What did AI think of my recent article about AI? first appeared on Docs by Design.
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