The right material for the right moment

Are your readers lost?

One of things I do at the fine-software-company-I-work-for is create documentation for other staff so that they know what it is they're trying to sell or support.

A couple of other writers on my team also create training materials: training manuals and online video (we use Techsmith's Camtasia, a great little product for creating videos of screen shots.)

It has become apparant to me that over time, we've placed this material in different places (database, ftp directories, intranet directories) to serve immediate demands, but now you have to know where to go to find this material.

One idea I picked up from John Catlin of TACTICS Consulting, who presented at AODC 2007, was to arrange an entry point to all of this information from the 'moment of learner need':

• Doing something for the first time
• When wanting to learn more
• When trying to remember
• When things change
• When something goes wrong

How this could be applied to the material we create could look something like this:

• Doing something for the first time
  - Video of existing functions
  - Training manuals
• When wanting to learn more
  - Help files
  - Podcasts
• When trying to remember
  - Quick help cards
• When things change
  - Video of new functions
  - Release notes
  - Big fixes
• When something goes wrong
  - Wiki knowledge base
  - Specifications & limitations
  - Community forum

Where this information might be located behind the above 'portal page' doesn't really matter, but it would make life easier if all these different files and formats were stored in a central database, like a document management system and the portal page served as an entry point to this information.

But either way, I appreciated seeing what I produce from a 'higher' perspective and not merely discrete projects that have their own files.

People need to access the right kind of information at the right time.