Technical and Business Writing

1. Technical and Business Writing Lecture 2: By Saqib Subhan

2. Strategies that encourages Task Orientation (Cont) • Encourage User Control of Information • Feelings among software users, that they decide what the program does for them • The manual should show the user that how they make key decisions, supply key information or determine key program output • E.g. specifying what a database program will search for and identifying which data the program will process

3. Encourage User Control of Information (Cont) • User need to feel in control of the program • Cross reference in manual and hyperlinks in online system can help to maintain the user sense of control over the document • This allow the users to go anywhere for the search of additional information • Chapter 3: Writing to Guide Procedures will discuss this strategy

4. Orient Pages Semantically • Arrange the elements of the page meaningfully according to the user’s job requirement needs • One of the best way to orient pages semantically employs visual and graphics to balance text in complementary way • This makes the user to understand and perform the job in better way • Chapter 11: Laying out Pages and Screens will describe this strategy

5. Facilitate both Routine and Complex Tasks • The manual has ability to represent both routine and complex task • Routine tasks • Repeated tasks that easily represents the conventional procedures • E.g. save file, open file, delete record etc • Complex tasks • These task required user knowledge to apply that comes from experience • E.g. using a spreadsheet software to calculate their salaries and identify their performance in annual reports • If the manual helps the user to perform complex task, it will be valued more by the user • This strategy will be utilized in chapter 5: Analyze your Users

6. Design for Users • The organization of manual comes from user needs instead of models and templates • The user driven manual should allow the users to: • Find what they need • Understand what they find • Use what the understand appropriately • Chapter 5: Analyzing your users and Chapter 8: Conducting Usability Tests will adopt this strategy

7. Facilitate Communication Tasks • User of software program required them to communicate about their work • These tasks are called communication task because they depend on the user’s workplace demand. E.g. print functions, report functions, disk output functions and data transfer functions etc supports communications tasks • The manual should facilitate the users to learn and apply the communication task • Chapter 12: Getting the Language right will uses this strategy

8. Encourage User Communities • Users often need encouragement to rely on other users of the program, their user groups • Task oriented documentations encourages users to identify and get help from others • Other users of the program (not experts) can render valuable help because they understand the user’s job demand • Chapter 5: Analyze your users and Chapter 6: Planning an Writing your document will use this strategy

9. Support Cognitive Processing • People uses mental model called cognitive schema, that help them learn new information, process the information and apply the information that comes at them at alarmingly faster and faster rate • The task oriented manual uses principles of knowledge representation and analogy to convey software features and applications to workplace tasks • These techniques are applied by writing the references

10. Principles of Software Documentations • The more a manual can supports productive work, the greater the chance of acceptance and satisfaction by a user • Goals of software user and Manual or Help