Could Facebook influence technical communication?
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On Palimpset, Sarah blogged that she has recently joined Facebook and mused whether Facebook could be used for technical support or other technical communications.
I started wondering what documentation might look like on Facebook or other social media. Currently, most documentation is the equivalent of Web 1.0 - printed manuals, PDFs, online help, and other forms that present useful information, but don't allow users to reorganize the information, to add to it, or to communicate. Communications with users are typically handled separately from documentation.
What might documentation look like on the Facebook platform or other social media (Web 2.0) platforms?
What is salient about Facebook for documentation?
On your Facebook profile, information is presented in modules. These modules are typically small, although some expand to fit the content. As a user, you can control which modules to display, as well as their location on the screen.
Facebook provides space for you or others to write ("the wall"). Additionally, many of the modules provide space to add comments. Notes can be used for longer, article-length pieces of information.
On a user's profile, Facebook lists some of the user's friends, along with a link to display all friends.How are these features relevant to documentation?
Information modules aren't new to technical writing. They're a key aspect of Content Management Systems, and have really taken off with XML and DITA. If we are using Facebook as a model, these information modules, would mostly contain small chunks of information, although some would expand for the needed content.
The user would be able to control which types of modules to display, and where to locate them on the screen.
Users would be able to annotate the documentation. These might be comments added to individual topics. If this were help on a multi-user system, each screen would have a place for messages, which could be a forum for adding tips or asking questions.
Facebook is about people; the friends displayed are part of the user's
social network. For documentation, instead of friends, a list of related
topics would be listed. If the list were over six, six topics would be
listed, with a link to the complete list of related topics.
Can you give an example of how this might work?
On Facebook, your profile is centered around you, the user. Everything is about you and your friends. For documentation, we must find another starting point. For example, if Facebook-like documentation were provided as a help system, the starting point could be the user's screen when clicking Help.
Information modules might be available to:
- List all tasks that can be performed on the current screen (with links to more information about the tasks)
- List all tasks that include the current screen.
- Describe the purpose of key fields on the screen.
- Provide keyboard shortcuts, or other sorts of accelerators.
A list of related tasks would be available.
The user could writer on "the wall" to write notes to himself (or other users) about the current screen, and to pose questions that other users (or someone in Support) might answer.
Does this seem like too much information to fit on one screen?
Perhaps. But if the system is as configurable as the Facebook profiles, the user can remove any modules that he doesn't want to see. Also, he can arrange the modules in any order or column, so that the overall layout meets his needs.
What about other social media platforms?
What about them? What do you think documentation would be like if it used a platform based on Myspace, LinkedIn, or twitter? Does Facebook inspire you in a different way?
If you have your own vision, write it up in your blog, and leave me a
comment. I'll post a round-up of the entries.
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(1) There are attempts to use Wikis for documentation, and I think this has a lot of potential. Users can either modify the original, or are given a sister page for each real documentation page to add comments, tips, best practices. This is a concept that has worked pretty well for Wikipedia, and could work for general documentation.
There are 2 issues. Legal -- Companies are required to provide documentation, so they cannot leave it to users to build, or they cannot risk users not destroying the documentation. We have a project where third-parties build add-ons to our product and we want to enable the add-on documentation to be integrated with the standard documentation so there is only one documentation set, but legal doesn;t like this. They want our documentation to clearly be separate.
(2) Facebook is not so much about modules (this you can get with RSS feeders and the like, or simply Web sites and individual pages). It is about enabling applications to use Facebook information (like your name and birthday, but more importantly your list of friends). For example, there are applications that display your mutual friends with another person, or show you all the activities of only your friends or which of your friends was voted "hottest" by their friends. Perhaps there is a way to provide documentation, and provide information on how others navigated through it, or some such functionality, I am not sure what would be particularly useful.
Daniel
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