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Trends in Software Documentation
In stark contrast to the suggestion that software products are easier to use these days, I would have to say that in general they are not any easier to use, especially Microsoft products. While they have more features and deliver more performance, I would be careful about making a blanket statement about ease of use, especially when we know the resources to create usable products in most of the industry has been shrinking. You could say that customers are more familiar with these products by now. It is obvious that Microsoft has a monopoly on the office tools; there is not a professional in corporate America who works in an office that has not used some Microsoft desktop product. But, to say that they are any easier is either naive or misleading. For example, Microsoft Word is as buggy with lists as several versions ago. The ancillary point that the documentation is getting smaller is another misleading trend. The documentation is NOT minimalist. It may be reductionist or partial but I have not found it any more succinct or more useful. I would be interested in hearing examples of where anyone thinks it is more useful beyond a few technical usability tweaks.
The features include more interconnectivity, something that should not be overlooked in a discussion of trends. And trends should not ignore the eclipsing effect by email as an application that has replaced much of what Microsoft Word — initially an office document tool — was originally designed for. Where many of us flocked to desktop publishing years ago, much of it has been replaced by email and instant messaging. Why publish a memo when you can drop an email? Why publish a newsletter when you can update a web site or post a blog? The interesting thing about email is that it has become the defacto work flow tool for many professionals, something that has outpaced even the Microsoft Word in ubiquity. And, in disagreement with the editor, programs are NOT more consistent. I would say they are all over the board in terms of what functions are standard and which buttons do what. The interface for FrameMaker and Microsoft Word and Adobe Acrobat and PaintShopPro, just as an example of common tools that we use, have more inconsistencies than consistencies. And a sign of this is that you can not go from one to the other with content without a major effort. (Why is it taking these products so long to adopt an interchange format, even XML, as an output?)
I would have to agree that PCs ARE becoming more pervasive. That is an understatement. Your phone, your camera, your hearing aid, your TV, and your car all have computers in them now. We are becoming more networked and in some strangely unpredicted ways. I do not know if I would say that users are any more savvy, but there are a lot more users who are doing rudimentary things with all these devices. But I have been to groups that still do not know how to use Windows or navigate on a desktop. But the penalty for not knowing these skills is becoming steeper.
To the point about paper still being around, allow me to suggest that, while documentation is expensive to produce physically, that is not why we are producing less of it in hard copy. If the Internet did not exist, if computers were not networked, we _would_ be printing because it would be the most effective and reliable way for conveying information. It is not because it is expensive to ship hardcopy, though that may be the case in many instances. More likely it is because it is pointless to do so now when you can instantly send a softcopy or post the information in an electronic form. We say that you will never get rid of hard copy, but the truth is that so much more information these days is read online (whether on TV or computer monitors or cell phones) that we do not even think about. And it is not just computers that are being interconnected; it is the information itself that we are connecting. Why embed the information in a PDF file when you can have your database on the Web for users to search? The containers of information and how that information is connected is a new discipline that begins with information architecture and information modeling but does not end there. The limits of paper documentation are not just that it is hard copy and heavy to ship around. It is primarily limiting because you cannot interconnect it and full-text search in the way you can with online information. Our audience is not just humans anymore, in a sense.
Which brings me to another point. The editorial did not even mention automation. Whether it is the tools that software documentation experts use to create API Reference docs or whether it is more template-driven structured development or whether it is automated PDF creation and production-end automation, the use of computers is speeding up development and production across the industry. There is so much that is happening with automation in all those stages. Also, most of the editorial was about end user documentation for mainstream products, but practitioners know that there are many of us out here that work on other types of documentation in support of software development and there are many products that are not for mainstream users. I would say this part is growing and is the place to look for trends.
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