Technically Speaking

If you’ve ever wondered if user documentation should go through the same QA cycle as the code, here is an answer in an example from Kids.Woot.com:

“Nothing good in life is easy. So it is with the AMAV 9002Motorcrafts Locomotive Kit. For one thing, the included directions are wrong: you must mount the motor with the opposite orientation shown in the assembly instructions. But even once you’ve figured that out, assembling it is no walk in the park. Or train ride in the park.

“Well, why should it be? Anybody can snap a couple of pieces together and spend the next four hours patting himself on the back. The AMAV 9002 Motorcrafts Locomotive Kit teaches thought. Planning. Persistence. In today’s go-go microwave drive-thru download culture, those are all lessons that kids could stand to learn.

“We’re still trying to figure out what lessons they’ll learn by seeing Daddy have a nervous breakdown trying to figure this thing out. It’ll be educational, one way or the other.”

(Copied from Kids.Woot.com on 3/15/2010)

In this case, these instructions give the wrong directions, so that if you follow the directions, the train DOESN’T RUN! That will be a bummer for little Timmy once the train is all put together. Not to mention frustration for parent who is trying to help get it together to make Timmy’s day.

My three year old loves to play outside. About a year ago, we got him a Skuut, but because we lived in a condo, he only rode it once or twice last year.

I loved the Skuut when we bought it because of its all wood design, and the way it teaches young kids to balance on the bike before they are ready to learn to ride a bike. It is a perfect ride for a 2-4 year old, and the seat is adjustable, so it can grow with him.

Since the first of the year, since we are in our new house, Nathaniel has re-discovered his Skuut, and he absolutely loved it for the four or five days he got to use it. Then the wood cracked and the handlebars fell off:

My wife contacted Skuut wondering about replacement parts. The representative had us send some pictures of the problem, and then they wrote back saying they would replace the entire bike for free, including free shipping to our house. What great customer service! It’s refreshing to see a company who cares about (1) their customers and (2) the quality of their products.

Our replacement Skuut arrived yesterday and today my little guy is out riding his heart out again, and loving it. Thanks Skuut for caring about your customers and making this a great experience for us.

If you are looking for a quality bike product for a toddler or pre-schooler, I recommend you check out Skuut. It’s a great product from a great company with fabulous customer service.

Thanks Skuut!

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Please note, Skuut did not ask me to write this review, nor did they know that I had a blog. I chose to write the review because I value companies that have great customer service. I did receive a free Skuut replacement, but only because the previously purchased one was broken–not as compensation for providing any kind of review.

Back in 2004 we received a much needed gift: a little red truck named Lassie. Lassie was a 1984 red Toyota pick up truck that got her name because when my in-laws owned her, she was stolen several times, yet every time she came back home (the police found the truck and brought it back). Since she always came back, they named her Lassie.

We’ve used Lassie since then as a second car to our 02 Nissan Sentra. However, due to the pending birth of our third child, we needed something larger than the Sentra. We’ll have three kids 3 and under, and you just can’t fit three car seats in the back of a Sentra. At least if you want both doors to close. Working with my friend Clip Palmer at Just a Car Lot we were able to get a fantastic deal on a 2008 Kia Sedona (pictured below).

That gave us three vehicles for two drivers and a garage that only fits two cars. Plus, Lassie has been having some plumbing trouble lately, and has been leaking oil and brake fluid. (In fact, the brakes have been failing on occasion, like the time I flew past the Walgreen’s drive through window; luckily there were no cars in front of me.)

Thus, we made the decision to support the National Kidney Foundation with a Kidney Cars donation. This is a great program, and I hope that our small donation can help out some people who really need it. So we had to sacrifice Lassie, but it was for a good cause. Click on the link below to learn more about the National Kidney Foundation’s Kidney Car program.

Probably most of you don’t know that I changed jobs recently, which is part of the reason I’ve been posting so infrequently. When you change jobs there is so much to learn, and it takes time.

One of the benefits of my new job is that I’m working with an impressive team. I have great respect for every one of my team members. We have four technical writers, three trainers, and our manager. They are quite the group. We have Intermountain STC chapter president Ben Minson, the unstoppable Tom Johnson of I’d Rather Be Writing, and fellow Flare pro Derek Warren. (Derek’s mother, we discovered, is really good friends with my wife. They met while serving as missionaries in Russia.)

Recently we added a new component to our team meetings: Design Review. Every other team meeting, three team members get 30 minutes each to talk about projects they are working on, and they get to demonstrate some of the cool things they are integrating into the project. As a team, we look at the project and both learn from what they’ve done, and make suggestions on how they might improve the project.

Our first design review was this week. Captain Ben was out sick, so he didn’t get to present his work, but we got to see some of Tom’s work, as well as the work of Mike, one of the trainers on our team. I was super impressed with both of their work. Tom demonstrated how he was using a Wiki to manage documentation for a community-developed software product. Mike showed us how he created an online quick reference guide that used JavaScript and divs to hide content and only show the part that the user needed at that moment.

I found both demonstrations very interesting. It was great to see how Tom is working to involve the community in documentation of a community-developed software tool. We talked about the wiki as a documentation source, and discussed the pros and cons of using a wiki for documentation. Tom is up doing a presentation at a university in Idaho today and tomorrow, and he is going to see if he can encourage the university tech comm students to contribute to the project. I’ll be interested to watch to see how that develops. As for Mike’s presentation, I was very impressed with the professional quick reference website that he created in Dreamweaver. It made me re-think how we can provide quick reference material to our customers. We spent a lot of time talking about how you know when to provide it in a quick reference page format, and when to create a full help system, and I found that discussion useful.

I am going to like these review sessions. They are mentally engaging and it’s fun to see what other team members are doing. I think it will help all of us improve our current projects, and help us be better writers overall.

According to MadCap’s website, MadCap Flare V5 is now available for everybody! If you have a maintenance agreement, I guess that means you can expect your Flare V5 license to arrive shortly!

If you want to know more about what is coming in the latest version, check out my pre-release blog post.