The 2007 WritersUA Skills and Technologies Survey
Skills • Technologies • Platforms • Tools • Survey Home
The use of technologies is a defining element in the identity of software user assistance professionals. Enhancing a product's usability requires transforming our words and ideas into digital form with a variety of technologies to help us do that. In our survey we provided a list of popular user assistance technologies and asked the respondents to value the importance of those technologies in their current development efforts.
The technologies we presented to the survey respondents are broad solution technologies as opposed to specific file formats. For example, Microsoft’s HTML Help provides a comprehensive solution to user assistance in the Windows environment, while HTML is a technology that gains value only when used in conjunction with a broader technology like HTML Help or browser-based Help. Foundation technologies like HTML, XML, and JavaScript are dealt with specifically in the Skills section of the survey.
The figure below shows the top-rated user assistance technologies. These technologies are rated as either "4" (Very Valuable) or "5" (Invaluable), the top two ratings on a five-point scale. The yellow bars show the current results and the pink bars show the ratings from the 2003 survey for comparison.
Support for Adobe Acrobat (83%) keeps it at the top of the list as the most valued technology component. This viewer has become a staple in our documentation sets. The Acrobat PDF files can be delivered on an installation CD or via the Web. In the past, this technology was mainly used for legacy print documents like user guides, and also for supplemental white papers and troubleshooting information. Today we find many organizations using Acrobat PDF files as the primary distribution format for product documentation.
The use of browser-based Help (77%) continues to be very popular with our respondents placing it second. The lure of displaying content in a web browser window seems to offer enough positive value for us to favor it over more feature-rich, platform-specific proprietary Help systems. This form of content delivery uses standard and non-standard Web technologies to deliver Help content through Internet Explorer and Mozilla browsers. Implementation strategies run the gamut from using basic HTML pages to proprietary solutions, such as WebHelp and WebWorks Help, to complex renderings employing custom JavaScript and Active Server Pages.
The World Wide Web (71%) continues to increase in visibility as a key element of our user assistance as evidenced by the strong showing in the survey. Until recently, the Web was primarily used as a supplement to online Help and printed manuals. As we move increasingly toward Web-based applications and broadband Internet connections, server-side deployment of user assistance via the Web is becoming a hot topic in many tech pubs departments. So the Web is filling more than one role.
Traditional documentation components such as printed manuals (54%) and quick reference materials (63%) have declined in usage, but are still valued highly by us.
The use of Microsoft HTML Help (50%) has diminished to use by just half of respondents. This has decreased significantly over the past several years.
Embedded user assistance (49%) finishes out this list of top technologies with a strong increase over 2006. The technique of adding helpful information directly into the user interface has become very attractive to many of us.
Here are the percentages of respondents rating the rest of the technology choices as either "Very Valuable" or "Invaluable":
