It’s just November but it’s high time to think over the next year and upgrading your skills. So, let’s see what skills will be desired in 2020.
Video Tutorials
Visual content is more representative than ordinary text — people easily get the main idea through pictures, screenshots, diagrams, videos and so on. But nowadays videos are the most popular form of providing information. And technical writers should be able to create videos in 2020. By videos I mean not only feature videos that help to learn how to use a product but also tutorials, product overviews, presentations and so on.
Of course, it’s hard to make videos, they require knowledge of different tools, assiduity, analyzing skills and so on. But if you build these skills and learn some tools for making videos, you’ll be definitely a step ahead of your coworkers.
Online Helps
Documentation is not a printed text anymore — in order to make it more accessible many companies create online documentation. Online helps have a wide range of advantages:
- Integrated. Online help is integrated directly into the software interface, so a user can read the necessary information by clicking a link or button on the interface.
- Immediate. As online help can be integrated, it provides “just in time” information that gives an immediate answer to a question about a specific window, feature, or field. This saves the company on support.
- Paperless. Online help provides useful information without the need for printed materials. This saves the company money and the end-user space on their desk.
- Comfortable. Users can open documentation through different devices not only on a PC, that’s make online help more user-friendly and accessible.
Context-sensitive Helps
Context-sensitive help is a kind of online help that contains a specific point in the state of the software, providing help for the situation that is associated with that state. The main advantage of context-sensitive help is accessibility — there is no need to open the whole documentation to read the necessary info. Each topic is supposed to describe extensively one state, situation, or feature of the software.
Context-sensitive help makes not only documentation more useful but also the software itself because if there are some features that might be difficult for users, they will immediately get the info by opening context help.
As for me, I already use it thanks to ClickHelp — a help authoring tool for technical writing. With ClickHelp, it’s easy to generate context help and implement it. You can learn more from their help topic: Context Help.
Conclusion
In order to build the right skills that will be useful, communicate with your target audience — what people need and how you can help to make their experience with a product more effective.
