One of the things I love about working at Author-it is it’s my job is to show our products and talk to people. I like that because I really think our products are some of the best. Remember, I chose Author-it as the company I wanted to work at, so I showed up liking the products and what was possible.

Towards that, we have a series of webinars that are insanely popular and I’m delighted.

Webinars

We have webinars scheduled out to January at this point. Some of these are about our tools and how they help, some are about other topics.To find out what we have going on, click here.

I strongly urge you to sign up even if the day or time is bad for you. We record the webinars and if you are signed up, you automatically get a link to the recording the next day.

If you are already attending, I want to thank you. These are popular beyond my wildest hopes and it’s because of you all. You’re making me look very good!

Customer feedback

Along with showing products, I talk to users. Not all users are happy people. And strangely, I almost prefer to talk to customers who are not delighted – I get valuable insight.

I’m talking recently with a customer who finds the interface for Author-it less than friendly. I agree that sometimes things are not where I would expect and sometimes the discoverability is less than perfect. But his feedback is helpful and we’re looking at what we can do in the next versions to improve.

I’m also getting feedback based on his workflow. That’s really helpful. One of the many things I’ve learned in nearly 20 years as a professional Tech Comm person is that there are many different workflows and they almost always have a good reason.

A great tool doesn’t force you to change your workflow completely to use it.

A great tool helps you use your existing workflow and improves the places where it was just not working well.

I want our products to be great tools. I want them to help you improve your workflow where you need the improvements. I know where I see ways to improve but why don’t you tell me?

Your input

So, regardless of the tools you’re using, what just doesn’t work in your workflow? Where are you looking to improve so things go better?

Last week I travelled to Melbourne to the annual AODC conference. It was good catching up with the technical communicators there and gave me a chance to introduce a new direction that Author-it is moving in – Real Time Performance Support. I gave a talk about the background behind the rise in Real Time Performance Support and outlined how they are being used and to what effect. We have a new product release soon – Author-it Assist, you can read more about this on our latest products page of the website http://www.author-it.com/index.php?page=latestproducts. I see this doing two things for people. Firstly, its a great way to provide contextual help – even in applications made by other people. Secondly these systems are used to create customized support for organizations tying all their applications contextually to their own content repository. We’ve done a lot of research and found that users need a support system in their work place that does several things:

• Integrates directly into applications and provides contextual learning without any need to access the development code or context ID’s
• Provide multiple contextual links from a single page
• Supports informal learning strategies (requiring less investment in formal training and less disruptive peer training)
• That serves up content using ‘just in time’ practice (push and pull the content to the user)
• Provides customized, contextual content that suits ‘how they use it’ not ‘how it works’
• Sends updates to contextual links independently of new software builds

These systems are being used to great success already and are certainly on the rise with the Knowledge Managers. It’s interesting that the technical writer is a big winner as it enables them to do so much more ‘retrofitting’ with their support material.

Do you, as a technical writer, see value in being able to retrofit your material into other applications?

Posted by Richard Ashurst, Business Development Manager, Author-it Software Corporation