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In the early '90s a lady named Francine Hyman had a company in Ann Arbor,
MI, called Communitec that among other things provided tech writer training.
One that I attended was called "Writing Documentation Your Users Will Want
to Use," or something close to that. "Documentation" in this case referred
to software user manuals. The course was very oriented to project
management and recognized "writing the user manual" as (obviously) one of
the tasks in the project plan. The radical recommendation was that the
outline of the user manual and the major software design features were
nearly the same thing and it should be a project goal to make it so. That
is, the manual writer is indeed involved in user interface design, but the
main point is it should occur from day one of the project. I suspect this
represents the ideal and our experiences are variations from this, as
threads like "documenting a mess" suggest.
I'm flabbergasted by the request "I'm interested in hearing from fellow tech
writers who have been involved (formally or informally) in interface
design." Seems to me if anyone has ever read anything you've written,
you've designed a user interface. Clearly "user interface" was used as
jargon and not generically, but the lesson remains and doubts that a tech
writer can help seem unfounded and based on personal insecurity or
intimidation or poor training.
So, the idea is to understand project management (see Microsoft Project),
see where your activity fits in the project plan, and push for being
involved as early as possible, if not ideally at the actual project plan
development stage. Isn't every product, no matter what it is, a
communication with its user and therefore every design effort ultimately a
technical communication project? If every project is a communication
project, then tech writers ought to be in great demand and well paid and
ought to be involved from the beginning and ought to be farther removed from
"secretary" than flabbergasting questions suggest.
