TSS Software

Greetings from the WinWriters Conference

Greetings from Portland, Oregon. Amanda Sadeghin and I have traveled to this beautiful city to attend the WinWriters conference. This conference is focused on how to create and distribute online help content.

We have learned that our target audience is changing from "baby boomers" to "gamers" and that the method of communicating with our users may need to change. We are already working in that direction by producing more video-based help.

Would you rather watch a movie or read the manual? Leave a comment and let me know.

Posted on 3/17/2008 4:05:00 PM by Barbara Miller

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Barbara Miller President & COO

Comments

March 29. 2008 00:29

I would like to see small segment video tutorials - like 5 minutes or less. I think this would be ESPECIALLY helpful for showcasing new features as releases roll out. Usually when a new feature comes out I have to play around with it a bit to see exactly how it works and how or if it is something we can deploy. Having a quick video walk through would help a lot with evaluation and deployment.

This doesn't have to be a highly polished HD production with surround sound. I just want something that is the equivalent of me standing over your shoulder while you explain how to do something. I'm thinking you put one person in an office with Cam Studio or something similar and tell people to be quiet outside the door. Smile There's no need to go to great time and expense to produce this. "Video Training from the Underground". The platform is a living breathing creature, and there will always be things that change, so keep it simple. Smile

In terms of manuals and help, I would LOVE IT if you would regress back to the days of old and use distiller to publish the guide and have hyperlinks from the TOC to the guide sections. It wold also be nice if the page numbers in the glossary were active links. Yeah...I know I could type in the page number in reader and hit enter, but I'm lazy!! Laughing

In the application itself, I would like to see A LOT more mouse over tool tips - especially in System Management. Though SysMgr is an area we typically don't spend a lot of time in, it's kind of a pain to have to open up the manual to cross reference option switches and try to remember what does what. I would highly recommend you add tool tips to all new features as they roll out. Giving users a ? to click on to get mouse over help would be awesome. Getting someone to stop and open the guide in the middle of working a file ain't gonna happen 9 times out of 10. Give them a ? to click and then click on the box/item in question to get a balloon help window would serve the application well.

And while we are on communication channels...live chat help.

And allow HTML img src tags in yer blog comments! LOL

Jay Orsi

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