Sacha showed entertaining and inspiring examples of videos that have been shot on smartphones, including Hollywood blockbuster films such as Steven Soderbergh’s “High Flying Bird” and “Unsane.” Soderbergh used innovative techniques such as being pushed in a wheelchair instead of using a dolly.
6 Key Principles of Effective Video Storytelling
Choose an opening shot that is going to hook your viewer
Use a lot of close-ups and extreme close-ups to capture detail and evoke interest
Switch camera angles frequently to keep it interesting
Bring it on home with the closing shot—a reward for the viewer, with an image to remember that finishes the story
Use sound to help establish the mood
Evoke emotions in the viewer—we remember how we feel more than what we see or hear
Here’s an example of what I learned. Technical writing “how to” made into art! IMHO! 😉
“Going to California” is a reference to a Led Zeppelin song lyric: “Took my chances on a big jet plane, never let ’em tell you that they’re all the same.” Each pair of students in the class made unique airplanes and unique videos!
Variations on a Theme – Adapting to Your Target Platform
Next I took the principles of great video storytelling and created 3 versions of a video:
Square for Instagram
This one is under 1 minute (timed for an Instagram feed), and square to display well in Instagram.
Short YouTube Version Captures Highlights
This is the length for my Another New York Love Affair art project, where each video is usually under two minutes. It captures the feel of the event, with behind-the-scenes warm-up and a flash on the audience at the beginning.
Full Length
This is the full length of the song. It’s my singing debut, and my Mom might want to see the whole thing!
For this reason, I am a major fan of MadCap Flare. I recommend this extremely robust, customizable Content Management System to all my clients when they need to output a mixture of shared and unique content to multiple audiences. The graphic design capabilities are incredible as well. I’ve replicated gorgeous designs from InDesign in MadCap Flare. And I recommend their Getting Started documentation as the gold standard for what end user documentation should be.
What Makes Outstanding Documentation?
Technical documentation must meet the needs of the audience. The best documentation enhances the user experience and is:
accurate
easy to find
easy to understand
describes the tasks the user must perform
provides solutions to those frustrating problems that make us turn to the documentation in the first place.
What’s Great About the MadCap Flare Documentation?
Text chunking makes the material easy to absorb
Navigation is excellent—easy to understand, with an easy-to-follow tree hierarchy, with concepts organized into task-based sections
Introductory material is provided in both text and video format, and the videos are very appealing and engaging
The language is simple and easy to understand, even when explaining complicated concepts
As a marketing tool, this URL makes a very complex, robust Content Management System seem non-intimidating and easy to use. For users of the software, this is a great starting point for learning basics, and even experts may return to this material for foundational concepts.
As a New York-based technical writer with more than two decades of experience writing for clients in varied industries, in locations from Vancouver to New York to Haiti to Chile, I notice universal themes—pain points that affect all of my clients, whatever their business line or type of documentation.
It’s all about the user experience (UX). If your customers and staff can’t use your product or perform their task, the result is pain and frustration!
Top 5 Technical Writing Pain Points
Here are the top 5 technical documentation pain points:
Obsolete! Existing documentation or procedures are out-of-date
Unclear! Instructions are hard to understand, so staff or customers can’t follow correct procedure
Disorganized! People can’t quickly find the information they need
Incomplete! There are no answers for the particular problem or task
Inconsistent! Procedures or instructions have been updated in one place but not another, leading to conflicting and confusing information
First Aid for Technical Writing Pain Points
Here I’ll tell you how good technical writing documentation addresses these pain points, one by one. Turn your user experience (UX) into satisfaction and delight!
One: From Obsolete to Up-to-the-Minute
Documentation quickly becomes obsolete without a plan for updating
Time takes a toll on any set of documentation, bringing changes that require updates. Consider this when you create your documentation, and use a system that will be easy to update. Of course, that train may have already left the station, in which case you need:
A Content Management System to keep track of all your source documents
A regular update process and schedule
A system for keeping track of changes, whether it’s specialized software or simply an Excel spreadsheet or an internal Wiki.
Two: From Unclear to Crystal
User testing is key to ensure your technical documentation is clear
Unreadability leading to lack of understanding is one of the biggest problems with documentation, and it usually occurs because the person who wrote the documentation knows the subject matter well but is not a skilled writer. Ways to ensure your documentation is crystal clear:
Use a simple writing style aimed at an eighth-grade reader
Explain all jargon and technical terms
Get actual users to follow the instructions and test the procedures – sounds like a no-brainer, right? But few companies actually do this!
Three: From Disorganized to Swiss Precision
Tagged and structured content is as organized as a Swiss candy shop
Disorganized, hard-to-find information is a very common problem, especially with complicated software or procedures that require lengthy documentation. If you have a thick binder of operating procedures or a stack of user guides, chances are, no one will look at them. But even a slender tome won’t help if the user can’t find the information they need.
To make your content findable:
Organize topics with clear titles and headings
Deliver content in a searchable online format so that people can quickly look up the subject
Include alternate search terms in your text or tags, so that people kind find a subject even if they don’t know the exact term that they’re looking for
Organize content by user task, not by the software menu structure.
Four: From Incomplete to Spot-On
Do you have gaps in your documentation?
Identifying gaps in the documentation is tricky, because you don’t know what you don’t know. Here are some sleuthing techniques to discover what’s missing and fill the holes:
Test the software or process rigorously, to find out what areas haven’t been documented
Make a list of all the tasks or procedures your users need to perform and correlate this to the existing content to identify gaps
Try doing the task wrong to find out what trouble-shooting tips your users will need
Again, user-test the documentation and watch where they go wrong, as well as what kinds of information they try to look up, then make sure you give them what they need!
Five: From Inconsistent to Single Source
Consistency is king!
Inconsistency is a problem that often creeps in over time as different people update the documentation set, perhaps making changes in one place but not another, or using different terminology to describe the same thing. Even different writing styles can be confusing to the end reader.
With technical writing, consistency is king! To achieve it:
Develop style and terminology guidelines, and follow them
Keep on track by having an editor or dedicated staff member oversee all updates when you have a team making changes
Use a Content Management System such as MadCap Flare to single source your text, so that a change only needs to be made in one place and it will be automatically updated throughout your documentation set.
A Cure for the Pain
An expert technical writer helps you succeed!
What is your top pain point? Do you need a remedy?
Karen Rempel, technical writing expert, to the rescue!
A good documentation specialist can solve your unique problems and create a set of documentation that meets your user needs and is easy to maintain.
The technical writer is the advocate for your user, and brings a perspective that will help you design documentation that is findable, clear, and easy to follow.
You get what you pay for. If you have a complex project, a product that is complicated to use, or procedures that are difficult to perform correctly, you need an experienced, expert technical writer. Budget for a professional, and you will save money in the long run.
Former CIO Linda Orlando, technical writing consultant Karen Rempel, and CEO Judith Erwin celebrating Orange Day at Grasshopper Bank, May 2018 (working towards getting the bank ready for the official opening, which occurred in May 2019)
It was a day of celebration yesterday, as Grasshopper Bank completed its journey from conception to implementation. Grasshopper Bank is the first new bank to open in New York City since the housing crisis of 2008. The “C-Suite” team is led by CEO Judith Erwin, and some of the top women in the banking industry are the lights guiding this financial institution. The dynamic team, composed of industry heavyweights who have over 200 years of combined experience in commercial banking and financial services, raised close to $100 million in order to obtain OCC* approval. The bank will focus on New York’s “innovation economy,” with corporate, venture capital, and start-up clients.
I played a crucial role in helping the new bank obtain approval from the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency (OCC) and make it to the starting line. I developed over 50 required standard operating procedures, working with various roles across the bank to determine procedures that would guide staff to perform all daily operations tasks in compliance with federal banking regulations. I brought my expertise in T24 to the task, and helped develop and document software requirements as well as procedures. My role included business analysis and training as well as technical writing, and I helped the team learn end-to-end processes for all daily and monthly procedures, from taking a deposit and boarding a loan to generating a financial statement.
I worked closely with the Chief Risk Officer, Sally Myers, to develop the required procedures to provide oversight from a risk mitigation and compliance perspective. I worked with CFO Sangeeta Kishore to ensure that the Operations team provided all required data and reports to her desk in a timely manner.
It was an exhilarating challenge and a great deal of fun, working with a fantastic team of people in an extremely dynamic, fast-paced environment. My daily compadres were the Operations team, under COO Gary Blumenthal, and it was a real pleasure to work with this group to ensure they would be able to perform all required tasks on day one.
We focused on the user experience (UX) to ensure that staff and customers will love using the bank’s internal and external banking tools, developed for mobile and the web. The team of T24 consultants under Nikki Nelson were amazing to work with, and they were instrumental in bringing the bank to the point of opening the doors yesterday.
I wish the wonderful folks at Grasshopper Bank every success as they open their doors for business. Mazel tov!
*The OCC is an independent bureau within the United States Department of the Treasury that was established by the National Currency Act of 1863 and serves to charter, regulate, and supervise all national banks and thrift institutions and the federally licensed branches and agencies of foreign banks in the United States.
I recently took a course on video storytelling at the Craig Newmark Graduate School of Journalism at CUNY. Bob Sacha was an awesome teacher—smart, interesting, and instructive.
