Customers and Content

Ideas and opinions about technical documentation

Refining my ideas about videos

I’ve established (at least to myself) that I need to create more videos for my documentation. I’m still working on the details: length, content, and how I can convince other people to do the narration.

Even for short videos (which is what these will be), I know from experience that there’s a lot of editing involved. And I get sick of hearing my own voice very quickly.

So it’s Time to create some guidelines. And next month (or so) I’ll review them to see how well they corresponded to reality.

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What we write (and why I need to create more videos)

One topic keeps coming up in discussions about technical writing, and which bounces around in my head: What type of user docs should we create? The standard triumvirate is Conceptual, Procedural, Reference. But I’ve written that content as separate topics, as topics that contain two of the three, and even as topics that contain all three.

I have to warn you that I don’t have a definite answer. I doubt that one exists, but I believe that by addressing it, I’m improving the docs that I’m writing, and maybe getting closer to a solution. Although I suspect that the answer is a frustrating “It depends!”

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