You know that moment in the shower when you suddenly get an excellent idea? That happens when your brain, working away quietly while you’re talking to yourself about what could possibly have compelled you to buy shower gel that smells like a food item, suddenly connects two dots. We say that things just clicked, or …
Tag Archives: Tips and tricks
You’re not suffering from writer’s block; you’re suffering from indecision
That dreadful moment (hour? day?) when the words won’t come. We think of writer’s block as something that is stopping a well formed image from settling into the right words. But in reality, a writer’s block happens when our mental image is a little hazy and abstract. We can’t put it into words because words …
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Separate the user’s needs from the solution
In a conversation about your user’s needs, it’s natural to start throwing out solutions almost immediately. Someone brings up an aspect of the user’s needs, and someone knows how to answer that aspect. But suddenly, that one aspect is all you’re talking about. You’ve just blinkered your view of the user to whatever can be …
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Writing from the ground up
Writing begins with awareness of the single word, then moves up. What can a word mean, and what does it actually mean in its current context? Does the sentence make its point as clearly as possible? Does the paragraph come together as a single point? Is it in the right place Does the whole document tell …
Quick writing tip: What’s the default, and why?
As a technical writer, one of the most important questions you can ask yourself is “what are the default values of the choices a user can make, and why”. For example, if an option is disabled by default, what does that tell you about the average user and their workflow? Are you trying to protect …
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UX Review: Emergency Measures
If you’re working on a product and have no particular understanding of UX, you can still do a basic UX review to stop the most obvious disasters. This will not be as good as getting a UX expert or experienced UX-QA to review the product, but it will be much better than nothing. First, describe …
Quick Writing Tip: Don’t Add Images Until the Text is Done
Here’s a quick writing tip for user manuals: don’t add your images to the manual until you’re done writing your text. This has two advantages. The first is that when you add images one at a time over the long course of writing a manual, it’s easy to overdo it. When you add them all …
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No Spec? No Problem: Testing When Nothing’s Written Down
Written in collaboration with Efrat Wurzel Got a new product to test, and the most documentation anyone can provide is an e-mail saying “wouldn’t it be cool if we got drunk and then wrote some code”? Don’t worry – testing without a spec is not quite the disaster you were expecting. Using some exploratory testing …
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Screen-Cap Tips for Beginners
If you’re starting out in technical writing, here are some things to consider when adding screen-caps to user manuals and training guides. 1. Screen-caps should have data in the fields, to help people understand the window. If you want to show the window as it is when first opened, which is mostly empty, add a …
Understanding Last Week’s Notes
All testers know the feeling: coming in on a Monday, looking at your notes from last week, and understanding nothing. If not for the handwriting, you’d think they were someone else’s notes. How do you write notes that you’ll understand on a Monday, without wasting too much time? Here are some tips, in no particular …
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