The 2008 WritersUA Skills and Technologies Survey
Skills • Technologies • Platforms • 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.
Support for Digital Manuals (74%) in the form of PDF is at the top of the list as the most valued technology component. Using PDF as a delivery format has become a staple in our documentation sets. 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 PDF files as the primary distribution format for product documentation.
The use of browser-based Help (72%) 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 (62%) 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 ubiquitous 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 asquick reference materials (51%) and knowledge-bases (46%) are still valued highly by over half of respondents. Others like paper-based manuals (32%) and Microsoft HTML Help (34%) have significantly dropped in popularity.
Embedded user assistance (39%) — 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":
