RE: RE: Future trends in technical writing?

["Gene Kim-Eng" <techwr -at- genek -dot- com>]

I would say it's both.  If products become "smarter" and more user friendly, the demand for people to write user documentation beyond the "Read Me First" and "Quickstart" inserts may very well diminish.  However, a whole new world of demand will open up for people to write embedded help, the scripts for those little popups of smiling talking heads that walk you through everything and the supporting information for all that stuff under the hood that makes the user-manual-free product appear to work seamlessly.  Product complexity isn't going to go away, it's just going to be better concealed from users.

Gene Kim-Eng




------- Original Message -------
On 11/27/2006 7:16 PM Jim Shaeffer wrote:
3. Most predictions of the future say either that technical writing will
be made obsolete by enhanced product design and ease of use. (This
prediction has been in vogue since the first GUI crawled out of the
electronic slime.) 
OR
They predict that the increasing complexity of modern technologies means
there will always be a place for writers to help people catch up. 
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