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I hope I'm not saying that procedures are obsolete or that we have no use for them in our writing. What I want to say is that we have to reconsider what it is we call a viable procedure. Robert Lauriston says it all... He finds lots of docs that tell him what he could have figured out on his own. Obviously, the docs were not aimed at him. If he's the typical user, then the docs are a waste of money to the degree that they took time and effort to explain the obvious.
I think writers are qualified to serve as user advocates. Also, stepping through the system and making narrative sense out of it is a good check to see whether the design works.
Hi-tech product delivery is an information management problem, and it's done by teams of information professionals. The spectrum of information management is broad, including customer input, product definition, design, code implementation, build management, bug management, tech support, budgeting... And yes, documentation. As tech writers, we're information management professionals. In that role we're qualified to contribute lots and lots... Not all of it limited to the production of pages. Thankfully, modern product development methodologies recognize this.
cud
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Hey Chris,
Your post inspires me to want to delve into the origins and history of
tech writing.
It seems odd that tech writing has evolved from probably a simple
beginning of written communication to the point where the writer is now
intimately involved with user experience design. That's not a bad
thing, it's just curious.
What qualifies a writer to perform this role? Is he/she the advocate of
the ordinary person? Is the writer somehow more "human" than the
developer, and therefore able to talk to the user in that person's
cognitive language?
I remember the days when you had to fight to get a word change into the
UI -- writers were not allowed to contribute in any way to the
interface, even from a language standpoint.
Now our ideas are welcomed, even solicited, regarding functionality,
user experience, usability, interaction design, navigation design,
screen layout, information architecture, and the rest of it.
Innovators aren't always good writers, and writers aren't always good
innovators. If our role largely makes procedures obsolete, then what
*is* our role?
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