Bad news for UGC from "Private Eye"

User-generated content (UGC) is all the rage these days. It's at the heart of many social networking web sites, and is increasingly becoming monetized as well. For example, there are web sites where you can upload a video from your phone, and earn a very small amount of money each time someone else pays to download your video.

For people working in technical publications UGC presents a bit of a paradox. On the one hand, gathering feedback from real users is always valuable and helps build a user community (and from a commercial viewpoint builds customer loyalty as well).

On the other hand, companies have a degree of responsibility for goods they sell, and they therefore need to provide accurate and authoritative instructions and reference material. An open and unmoderated user forum or Wiki might not always be the best vehicle for providing that kind of information.

Many advocates of UGC in general, and of wikis in particular, are fond of claiming that over time the Wiki will always be right, because anyone who finds an error will correct it. To my mind this assumes a degree of altruism which might not always be present, and so should not really be relied on. Wikipedia for example may be a useful source, but only if it is used with the same degree of critical evaluation as any other source.

An interesting example of the way that Wikipedia might be misused and might inadvertently contribute to the perpetuation of false information comes from the current edition of Private Eye, the satirical British magazine (Private Eye, no. 1220, 3-16 Oct. 2008). In an attack on the sloppy research practices of one sports journalist on a national daily newspaper, Anatole Kaletsky includes the following story in his "Hackwatch" column:

IDLY sabotaging the user-generated online encyclopedia Wikipedia following the UEFA cup draw back in August, a user of the b3ta web forum going by the name of "godspants" made a few amendments to the entry for Cypriot team Omonia Nicosia.

He (or she) noted that they were sponsored by Natasha Kaplinsky, that their former players included Jean Claude Van Damme and Richard Clayderman, and claimed that "A small but loyal group of fans are lovingly called 'The Zany Ones' - they like to wear hats made from discarded shoes and have a song about a little potato." As you do.

Writing up his pre-match report on Omonia's match against Manchester City for the Daily Mirror on 18 September, sports hack David Anderson decided to do some in-depth research. Thus it was that Mirror readers were informed that City manager "Mark Hughes will not tolerate any slip-ups against the Cypriot side, whose fans are known as the 'Zany Ones' and wear hats made from shoes".

Brilliantly, by the rules of Wikipedia - which relies on "verifiablility - whether readers are able to check that material added has already been published by a reliable, third-party source" such as "mainstream newspapers" - this is now officially true.

This may just be an amusing story, and I don't know how the community of editors on Wikipedia will handle it. (They probably did not foresee that something that was clearly a spoof would be used so uncritically by someone from the mainstream media.) But I see this also as a warning against relying too heavily on any user generated content.

Good news for DITA from Edinburgh

I have just returned from a trip to the European UA Conference which was held this year in Edinburgh. There were plenty of speakers who mentioned DITA, including one delegate who demonstrated how her company had developed a bespoke solution using DITA and a WordPress blog.
There was also a "fringe meeting" (if you hold a conference in Edinburgh you just have hold a fringe meeting!!) in which Tony Self of Hyperwrite introduced delegates to the DITA Help technical sub-committee which he currently chairs.
I was at the conference as an Exhibitor for DITA Exchange, and I was kept very busy with enquiries at my stand. My vendor presentation went well and the live internet connection to a Microsoft SharePoint Server located in Denmark actually worked.
But the best news for people concerned about the slow pace of DITA adoption is that in a pre-conference survey which asked delegates which help technology interests them for the future more than a third of delegates chose DITA. I think that's an impressive and reassuring statistic.

A few of my unfavourite things in Microsoft Word

I have enjoyed a long relationship with Microsoft Word for Windows, and I would describe myself as a reluctant admirer. As a heavy-duty user of Word, I understand that I am not using it in the way it was designed to be used, so I have modified my expectations accordingly. As well as my expectations, I have also learned to modify some of Word’s default settings so that I can have a little more control over its behaviour. As I have recently started working with Word 2007, I am going to describe some my my favourite tweaks – the adjustments that I make to disable my unfavourite features in Word 2003, and what the equivalent adjustments are in Word 2007.

Read the rest of this article on my web site...

Is editing a romantic profession?

I don't often do film reviews, but I have to mention something I watched the other night on DVD. Billed as a "sleek, sassy romantic comedy", Suburban Girl had, for me at least, a fascinating occupational setting - the world of book editing and publishing.

The film stars Sarah Michelle Gellar and Alec Baldwin as a pair of generation-bridging lovers - a young woman with a much older man. Gellar plays a lowly Associate Editor in a small publishing company while Baldwin is the Editor-in-Chief of a much bigger publishing house. Gellar spends much of the film poring over typed manuscripts, scribbling notes to authors and writing reports for her managers. The film itself is interrupted by "editorial" comments to the audience, introducing different chapters of the story.

Gelllar is not the only actor whose subsequent career has risked being overshadowed by a long-running successful TV role, but she is good enough her as the innocent from out of town to make you almost forget the vampires in her past. She is at her best when her character gets embarassingly drunk at a literary party.

Baldwin plays the successful unmarried man with a photo album full of previous lovers who treats his women badly. Not an entirely likeable character, but I found him more the more believable actor.

Overall, I'm afraid the film itself didn't really succeed for me, as the plot was very thin and the dramatic development of Gellar's character was weak and not entirely convincing.

Beware the Default Manual

Thomas Barker, in his book Writing Software Documentation, uses the term “the default manual” to describe a user’s guide that is organised according to features, rather than tasks. This sort of user’s guide has a chapter for each menu in a software program, and a section for each command. (For hardware, which Barker’s book doesn’t cover, it would describe every switch and button.) Barker rightly explains that this sort of manual is not really very useful for users. The information in a default manual, and in particular the way the information is organised, bears little or no resemblance to what the average user needs to do in their everyday working life. Like the old (and unfair) joke about Microsoft Customer Support, the information given is totally accurate but absolutely useless. In short, default manuals are the sort of things that give technical writing a bad name.

Like Barker, I believe in the importance of user focused documentation, and try never to write default manuals. Unfortunately a lot of my customers have yet to understand the difference between effective user assistance on the one hand, and the only kind of user manual they have ever been exposed to on the other, and the default manual is what they ask me to produce. I don’t always succeed in convincing them that their users deserve something better.

Barker does not discuss why default manuals are so prevalent. I can think of plenty of reasons. First of all default manuals appear to be quick and easy to write. They are based on the product’s features, so the structure of commands in user menus offers an instant structure for the manual, and an instant checklist to ensure that every thing is mentioned. Since they describe program features rather than user actions they are easy to write. Even the most junior programmer on the team knows that the New command on the File menu creates a new file. That’s why so many default manuals are indeed written by the most junior programmer on the team.

Default manuals reflect the developer’s world-view, or more accurately the development manager’s world-view. The development manager rarely sees any feedback or comments from customers, and has probably never spoken to a real life customer either. For development managers, thinking about users doesn’t just take time and effort, it requires a degree of objectivity and critical detachment from their work that was never part of their job descriptions. They have goals to achieve which are stated in terms of objects coded, features implemented, and overtime hours saved, not in terms of user task fulfilment or customer satisfaction. Those things have no relevance to their jobs or to their end-of-year bonuses.

The lure of the familiar is also significant. Like travellers’ tales of exotic creatures and peculiar peoples, the idea that a different and better way of writing user manuals might exist is regarded with more than a little scepticism by many in the developer community. Default manuals are all they have ever known.

A third reason for the popularity of default manuals is that they are an easy way of demonstrating that the development team’s “contractual obligations” have been met. I am thinking here of “contractual” in the broadest possible sense, and including not only written undertakings to external customers but also internal agreements and understandings with stakeholders within an organisation.

Default manuals are popular because they appear temptingly simple and easy, and because they can be shown to correlate directly to the product features. They can be written cheaply by an existing member of the team who won’t “bother” other developers with questions that waste their valuable time. Once they’ve been done, the development manager can tick several boxes at once – there is evidence that all the required features are there, the program’s features have been checked by a competent person, and hey presto, there are user manuals as well. In this scenario no-one is surprised or worried by the fact that the manuals will never be opened, let alone read. That was never anyone’s intention.

Fighting back against the default manual culture is a challenging and difficult undertaking, especially if you are the only professional writer around. But it is a noble cause and one that all technical writers should pledge themselves to.

How did they design Office 2007?

I have just read a fascinating interview with one of the people responsible for designing the ribbon interface of Office 2007. (Thanks to Peter Bogaards of InfoDesign - Understanding by design for providing the link - Peter always recommends excellent material.) I know a large number of technical writers who are heavy-duty users of Microsoft Word, and the ribbon interface was one of the new features of Word 2007 that many technical writers of my acquaintance did not like at all when it was first launched. A common early reaction was something like: "just when we got used to where all the commands were in Word 2003, Microsoft went and changed everything again!" Opinions of Word 2007 have mellowed somewhat over the last year or so, as professional technical writers have got used to the new interface, and developed efficient ways of working with it.

The interview itself is by Dan Harrelson of Adaptive Path, and in it he speaks to Jensen Harris, Group Program Manager of Microsoft’s Office User Experience team. The first thing that is clear from what Jensen says is that the heavy-duty professional Word user was never a focus of the Microsoft Office development effort. In fact, Harris says, it was ordinary users who were central to their thinking: "...we wanted normal people to be able to make beautiful, stunning documents and presentations. We wanted the average user to have access to professional-level results with fewer steps than in the past." Harris goes on to extol the virtues of being able to "beautify" a picture in your document with "great-looking designs", which you can now do with Office 2007's graphics engine. This type of aesthetic question is not usually uppermost in the minds of most professional technical writers. We are more interested in mundane stuff, like consistent application of formatting styles, paragraph or heading numbering that doesn't have a mind of its own, pagination that stays put, indexing, cross-referencing, tables of contents, and so on. In fact, most professional writers are really most concerned with getting the content right - making sure that the words themselves are accurate, concise, appropriate, effective - so even the word processing features we are interested in are actually a distraction for us. That may be why some technical writers get so annoyed when Word does unexpected things.

The most fascinating feature of the interview is the description Harris getting developers to observe usability tests.

"When you want to convince a developer to help you make a change to the product, nothing is as compelling as bringing the developer into the lab and having them watch people fail. (Video also works well if you can’t bring the developer to the lab.)

Putting a human face on a failure really drives home why it’s important to improve usability, and helps everyone to visualize concretely whom we’re building the software for. Any developer worth her weight wants to do the right thing for her users, and so you usually just need to show them a test or two, and you’ll find that they are much more willing to help you. We bring developers and testers into our user research labs as frequently as possible."

This is good to know, for several reasons. It's good to know that Microsoft use usability testing, and takes note of user research findings. It's even better to know that in this team at least, developers were engaged with the testing process. Telling companies reluctant to undertake usability testing that "this is what Microsoft do" may have a positive effect.

But it's also clear that Microsoft did not have heavy-duty users in mind when it developed Office 2007, which is why, in its standard "out-of-the-box" implementation, Word 2007 is still not the best choice for large scale technical publications.

Holidays and spam

Last week I disconnected myself from the Internet, got in the car and headed north for a week's holiday in the English countryside. (We stayed at Wheeldon Trees Farm, near Buxton, which is in the Peak District National Park.)

Apart from the fine weather (we were lucky), the beautiful countryside, the excellent country pubs, and the interesting sites to visit, the holiday had another added bonus. There was no mobile reception for our network at least where we were staying. This meant I couldn't even check my email to see how the world was faring without me.

The world survived. When I returned to London I found my email mailboxes jammed with over 1,600 messages in just 7 days - and this number excludes most of the mailing lists I subscribe to. That looked like far more emails than I usually receive, and I was worried that I might have chosen a particularly busy week to go away.

On closer examination, I found that my spam filters had filtered out around 1,400 messages into easily deletable folders, leaving about 200 legitimate messages to look at. These messages included newsletters, circulars, and adverts - and some spam emails that had slipped through the filters - so the actual number of emails that were for me personally was just a couple of dozen. So despite first impressions, we had picked a quiet week for our holiday after all.

I know all the reasons for spam, and I know how to ignore the scams and phishing attempts. My email addresses are out there in the wild, and I can't stop them. On an individual level, I know my ISP and mail software have pretty good filters that save me plenty of time. What worries me is the danger that the sheer volume of electronic junk may one day overload the Internet completely.