I’ve been training customers the last few weeks and so not as able to keep up on the blog as I would like. But, being in Author-it every day, showing various ways to make your workflow easier made me think a post with some of that might be interesting.

Feel free to add your own favorite things in the comments.

Variants in 5.5

We’ve had variants for some time. But the “fall back” feature is one I like a lot. Here’s how it works.

In Author-it Adminstrator, you need to either create a new variant or modify an existing one, depending of what you need to do. We’re going to look at an existing one – it’s called Version. Click the picture and then click it again to see it large.

The important thing here is the Browse button next to the Value list.

By clicking the Add button, I added various versions of the product to my library. I organized them in a hierarchy by using the green arrows in the upper left of the dialog box.

So, what does all this mean? It means that as I create new content I can assign a variant to the content. So, for example, I have an overview of the product. I wrote it for V2, but it  hasn’t changed in any of the versions since then.

But as I add content for the different version over time, I can assign different variant values to that content. Perhaps we did a bug fix/special version for a company and called it V2.1a.  For that version, we added some new content and marked it as V2.1a. All the content for V2.1 is in this book, plus the V2.1a content. But some of this content, we’ve not updated since V2.0 and don’t need to update – it’s all still accurate.

In other words, in one book, we have topics with a mix of versions assigned to them, using the variants.

So, maybe we’d like to publish the V2.1a book but we’d like to see what content goes in that version before we publish.

In Author-it Editor, we open the book. At the bottom of the list of topics in the book is the “Filter contents using variant criteria” list. If we click on that, we see a list of the available criteria and we can select one or more.

So, for example (click the picture and then click it again to see it large.):

What we see is just the content that is marked V2.1a and any content that appears in the fallback path, if there is no content marked V2.1a and any content that doesn’t have that variant criteria applied at all.

To make life even more interesting, I have another variant I call ShCountry. Because, in my example, we also now send similar but slightly different content depending on the country it’s going to. You can see that I selected Australia as the ShCountry variant and the ProductVersion as V1, You can see the topic marked with the V2 variant is lined thru. This means that topic will not appear in this output, if I select these variant criteria for publishing my book.

Because I can select to apply and select multiple variant criteria for my content, I can use one master book and then filter, based on the variants I select to meet my customer and product needs.

In conclusion

Well, I promised you several and gave you one favorite thing. The next blog post will be more favorite things. Promise.

We are in the business of getting people the information they need and letting them get back to their life. Fundamentally, that’s what we do, whether we write user manuals, policies and procedures, create illustrations, videos, or any other thing.

And in this information rich world, this is an important thing to do.

No one reads the manuals

If I had a US dollar for every time I’ve heard “No one reads the manuals” I’d be retired in the tropics, playing with large dogs and writing crazy stories. While no one reads the instructions is a true statement, it’s a false statement.

People do read the instructions we provide. They do. But not like a novel – when was the last time you read your employers Policies and Procedures guide, start to finish? Probably never. It’s not that interesting.

But you may have read a part of it in the last month – perhaps when you completed your expense report for attending the STC Summit conference. Because you couldn’t remember what the per diem was and how to charge that properly. Because you don’t fill out expense reports often, you needed to be reminded of how to properly do that task. So you could get on with your life.

And that’s how it works

This is how our instructions are used – on demand. People rarely read our instructions from beginning to end, to see how it all turns out. Typically, people read what they need to know right now and then move on.

Perhaps they need to refresh their memory about how to run the month-end report, or how to rewire the speaker wiring for the home theater system the 3 year old gleefully pulled out. or they need to create an expense report.

So how can we help?

We can create short, to the point instructions for these user moments. I call them Job Aids, you may call them something else. But they are short overview instructions for important infrequent tasks.

Installation is a good job aid – typically called Getting Started guides. For most things, you install one time and then never again. You probably don’t reinstall your garage door opener – after it’s complete, you can happily throw away those instructions.

Other tasks that make good job aids are running end of month and end of year reporting. Not done often enough to remember exactly how to do it so a refresher is helpful. You probably don’t need to include how to run a report, because reports may be run at the end of every day. How to set up the end of year report and archive the data is similar but different.

Make them available to your users

OK, so if my users only need these infrequently, how do I get that information to them, you may be asking yourself.

You can ship them with the product, if you know ahead of time what is needed. But most of us don’t have the luxury of knowing ahead of time.

If you talk to your support people, they can give you ideas. Many of the questions they get are actually Job Aid questions. So talk to your support people and see if they get the same sorts of questions.

Then develop the job aid. Try to keep it to one sheet of paper, front and back.

Now you can post the job aid in the support area of your website. Ask support to tell callers about them. If you send a marketing thing to your users every month or so, include links to the newest job aids to get people to know they are there.

Job aids can impact the company’s bottom line

Consider tracking statistics to see how often the job aids are looked at/downloaded and if those sorts of questions are being asked less often in Support. That’s how you know you’re being effective. Take those numbers to management as clear evidence the docs group is making a bottom line impact on the business.

Clearly someone is reading them, you can say. As a matter of fact, this month, X people read them. And Y people didn’t call support to ask about that topic, as compared to 6 months ago.

One of the things I love about being in the high tech industry is the learning never stops. I’ve always thought having a job where you do the exact same thing every day sounds terrifically boring. And in the high tech industry, that really doesn’t happen – every day brings something new.

Training

We’ve added training to my list of things I’m doing and I couldn’t be happier. I love teaching people. I’m so passionate about this industry and what we do. I get to now also help people by providing them the tools to learn Author-it. Then, after the training, they are going to do wonderful things with that knowledge and change the world.

And I get to be a small part of that. Wonderful.

Towards that end, we’re doing several things at Author-it, short term and longer term.

Online training is free

In case you’ve not heard, we’ve made all the materials for our Core training available in small nuggets and it’s all free. If you have 10 or so minutes, you can watch a video specifically about what you want to review and then get on with your day.

This is a Big Deal.

If you want to add to your skillset and learn Author-it, you can do that with the Learning Center and an evaluation copy of Author-it. If you want to brush up on something – perhaps your company has finally decided to do online help – you can refresh your knowledge in the Learning Center.

Did I mention it’s free?

Already popular

Based on the stats, this resource is incredibly popular already. If you’ve not been to the Learning Center, I strongly recommend you get over there and check things out.