Alternatives to the way of the dodo

["John P. Brinegar" <johnbri -dot- primenet -dot- com -at- BUBBA -dot- UCC -dot- OKSTATE -dot- EDU>]

Several of you have said:

--Nothing much will actually change.

--Paper won't really go away.

--Products won't really become all that intuitive.

--We still have to tell them the purpose of the software.

Since 1948, I have seen great changes in the work that technial
communicators do. I see many reasons to believe that our work will
continue to change, and to change significanly.

Several decades ago, it was sufficient to tell users everything they could
want to know about how a product worked. Using this information, users
could figure out how to use and to repair the products.

Today, most of us tell users how to use and to support our products. We
don't usually have to tell them much about how they work.

Increasingly, we technical communicators must contribute to the usefulness
of the products we support. We will do this by focusing on our clients'
ability to use our products to be more productive in their work. We will
provide whatever we can to aid users' on-the-job performance. This can be
done by

--helping to develop intuitive products,

--building aids for user performance into the products, and

--providing appropriate aids to user peformance apart from the products.

We will have many opportunities to broaden our work way beyond the mere
writing of technical manuals. Many of us, including myself, are already
doing much more than writing manuals and online help.

This is great fun! I hope to live another 50 years.

--
John P. Brinegar, Phoenix, Arizona, U.S.A.; http://www.netzone.com/~jbrinega/
Consulting and development
-Performance Support Systems
-Technical Communication
Phoenix Chapter, Society for Technical Communication