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Subject:RE: Bubble Your Pleasure, Bubble Your Fun From:"Giordano, Connie" <Connie -dot- Giordano -at- FMR -dot- COM> To:"TECHWR-L" <techwr-l -at- lists -dot- raycomm -dot- com> Date:Fri, 6 Jun 2003 11:16:18 -0400
Robert,
This presumes that consumer products are actually getting simpler for
consumers to use... I for one don't buy that. I've watched people (myself
included) struggle to program their telephones, their VCRs, assemble
furntiure and grills and so on, and not only is the documentation inadequate
in most cases, the design of the product is inadequate. Add to that sheer
information overload on every level, and it's a morass of what the field
should be doing vs. what it is doing.
Back at the beginning of the year, CBS Sunday Morning did a report on the
hot new career of technical writing... Which in essence said that because
the things people use every day were becoming more complicated, this was
going to be a booming field. I'm not sure I buy the booming field concept
either, but I've seen several of these stories on the internet and in the
news. Which might help explain the number of Motel Boys we tend to
encounter!
I go back to the premise that it's not about how many pages of documentation
it should take, it's about designing a product, any product, that people can
use in the way they want to use it.
MTC
Connie P. Giordano
Senior Technical Writer
Advisor Technology Services
A Fidelity Investments Company
704-330-2069 (w)
704-330-2350 (f)
704-957-8450 (c)
connie -dot- giordano -at- fmr -dot- com
"Pray that there's intelligent life somewhere up in space, 'cause I'm afraid
that we've been cheated here on Earth" - Clint Black "Galaxy Song"
-----Original Message-----
From: Robert Plamondon [mailto:robert -at- plamondon -dot- com]
Sent: Friday, June 06, 2003 10:43 AM
To: TECHWR-L
Subject: Bubble Your Pleasure, Bubble Your Fun
> The gist of my argument is this: The microprocessor created a
> temporary bubble in demand for technical writers because it put so
> many immature technologies in front of a public who had no previous
> experience or social support to guide their learning of them. Lots of
> ordinary consumers and office workers suddenly had strange new toys
> that needed documenting. This phase of the microprocessor revolution
> is largely over and we are
returning
> to normal levels of demand for technical writers.
It's probably safe to say that the demand for voluminous consumer-level
documentation is erratic over time. The computer revolution filled
everyone's bookshelves with manuals and books, while the VCR and digital
watch revolutions did not. A digital watch requires about two pages of
crummy documentation to allow the user to limp along. A VCR requires maybe
16 (32-64 with all the blah-blah-blah safety and FCC boilerplate). Doing an
equally incompetent jobs for a computer system (hardware, software, and
operating system) requires hundreds or thousands of pages.
As others have pointed out, the engineer-to-engineer and
engineer-to-technician tech docs don't go through these booms and busts, and
probably follow the general market. As products get simpler on one level,
they get more complex on another.
One of the great constants of the universe is that engineers never stop
working. The flow of new products has its ups and downs, since R&D costs a
lot of money, but it never stops. A lot of new technologies were developed
during the Great Depression -- color movie and camera film,
pressurized-cabin airliners, affordable superheterodyne radios, television,
radar, and many medical technologies.
-- Robert
--
Robert Plamondon
President, High-Tech Technical Writing
robert -at- plamondon -dot- com http://www.plamondon.com/HIGHTECH/homepage.html
(541) 453-5841
"We're Looking for a Few Good Clients"
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