Articles

Technical writer teams are asked the impossible: chronically understaffed, fulfill growing expectations, while dealing with the disruptions of a barrage of technological innovations. Technology however doesn’t need to be a curse, it could be a blessing: new technologies could also be used to help technical writers. In this series I want explore how artificial intelligence and new/rediscovered interaction models for software documentation could redefine technical writing and its deliverables. Part 4: Repeating Clippy’s mistakes with Walkthroughs Learning from Clippy’s mistakes. How can we define proactive support? How can we avoid repeating Clippy’s mistakes?

Technical writer teams are asked the impossible: chronically understaffed, fulfill growing expectations, while dealing with the disruptions of a barrage of technological innovations. Technology however doesn’t need to be a curse, it could be a blessing: new technologies could also be used to help technical writers. In this series I want explore how artificial intelligence and new/rediscovered interaction models for software documentation could redefine technical writing and its deliverables. __Part 3: Clippy, misunderstood brilliance before its time__ Microsoft’s Clippy was a great idea: sometimes it does pay off to give people advice even if they didn’t ask for it yet. So why did it fail?

Technical writer teams are asked the impossible: chronically understaffed, fulfill growing expectations, while dealing with the disruptions of a barrage of technological innovations. Technology however doesn’t need to be a curse, it could be a blessing: new technologies could also be used to help technical writers. In this series I want explore how artificial intelligence and new/rediscovered interaction models for software documentation could redefine technical writing and its deliverables. __Part 2: The Helpful co-worker model__ Teaching and giving advice is part of human nature. Helpful co-workers as a support services: when are they successful and how do they fail?

This year saw the renewal of Pronovix’s ITrainee program, open to university students, recent graduates or those seeking a change or new career. Members of the Pronovix Mentoring lab selected four participants, who were then given the chance to learn about web development and observe the Pronovix workflow environment. Our mentors set up the timeline, defined the goals and established the correlating tasks the participants would be undertaking. We used our experience from the previous programs to establish a workflow with tasks that got the most out of the trainees. There were still some challenges that the mentors did not expect, we discuss them below.

Technical writer teams are asked the impossible: chronically understaffed, fulfill growing expectations, while dealing with the disruptions of a barrage of technological innovations. Technology however doesn’t need to be a curse, it could be a blessing: new technologies could also be used to help technical writers. In this series I want explore how artificial intelligence and new/rediscovered interaction models for software documentation could redefine technical writing and its deliverables. __Part 1: Documentation at a crossroads__ What jobs do we need documentation to fulfill? Why is documentation under pressure? Why do we need AI in documentation?

Technical writer teams are asked the impossible: chronically understaffed, fulfill growing expectations, while dealing with the disruptions of a barrage of technological innovations. Technology however doesn’t need to be a curse, it could be a blessing: new technologies could also be used to help technical writers. In this series I want explore how artificial intelligence and new/rediscovered interaction models for software documentation could redefine technical writing and its deliverables.