Delivering the Right Content to the Right Audience

Bernard Aschwanden
www.publishingsmarter.com
bernard@publishingsmarter.com
Audience focused delivery
12:25
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@publishsmarter

Overall Objectives
12:25@publishsmarter
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 It's all about the audience.
 Discussions abound about the informed consumer,
audience metrics, and personas, but how do you
actually organize and create content geared to
multiple audiences?
 Learn tips and techniques for planning, writing, and
publishing which help you deliver the right
information, to the right audience, in the right format,
at the right time, and let them make the right
decisions.

Housekeeping and note taking
3
 A/V concerns: Turn off other
apps that hog bandwidth
 Not all slides or topics are
equally weighted
 Use some, discard others
 Slides speed varies
(reference)
 Questions? Ask along the
way!
 I’d love to claim errors/typos
is on purpose… they isn’t,
ain’t, and weren’t never;

About your speaker
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 Publishing Smarter:
President
 Content strategist,
publishing technologies
expert, author, and geek-
enough
 Certified Technical Trainer
 DITA
 Content management
 Topic-based writing
 Society for Technical
Communication
 Past President
 STC Associate Fellow

Solving business problems through communication
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 We help clients:  By helping clients:

Standard disclaimer
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 In the interest of brevity I
will make some blanket
statements to keep it
simple
 It’s not all 100% “the truth”,
but I’ll stay close
 Purists may complain
 And they are wrong!
 (except when they are right)
 These slides are to guide
you, not to write rules in
stone

Thinking about your user
@publishsmarter 12:25
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A few easy steps

What do differing audiences want?
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 Tailored content
 Not “the complete dummies guide to using a Windows or
Macintosh or Linux system from novice to expert and
covering what a mouse is as well as how to configure server
blades as a PDC or BDC for web hosting”
 Instead, they want to get content that is specific
 To their product
 To their platform
 To their abilities
 Actually, they don’t want that at all. What they want
is…

They want you to get rid of the problem
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 Stuff to work
 Stop writing content, start to solve the problem
 If you TRULY want to deliver what the audience
wants, focus on reducing their need for
documentation
 If you can’t reduce their need for it, reduce the volume
 If you must deliver to many audiences at once, give
them as little content as possible, as focused as
possible

Document review
10
 Start by reading your content
 ID what can go away, and do so early
 The less to review and clean up in detail, the better
 Why write product specific content at all?
 If I am reading “Microsoft Word 2020 for Windows 10 User
Guide” I don’t need to see “You can save a file in Microsoft
Word 2020 for Windows 10” as a sentence.
 I defy you to tell me what software the following slide
is documenting!

Print (for every software tool, ever)
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Searched Google for ‘how to print word’
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Got this as the first hit... (ARGH)
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https://support.office.com/en-ca/article/Printing-and-print-preview-1c15515c-98b5-4421-baa9-68b7a870398a

Includes a video on how to print, plus Access
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Excel, OneNote, and Outlook
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PowerPoint and Project
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Publisher, Visio
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And finally, Word... (oh, go somewhere else)
18

And once there, I can scroll down
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And continue to scroll down
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I got annoyed MAKING these slides
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Here it is. Finally.
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What I finally found
What I suggest about a day
ago
Follow these steps to print a
document.
1. Click the File tab, and then click
Print.
TIP To go back to your document
and make changes before you print
it, click the File tab.
2. The properties for your default
printer automatically appear in the
first section. When the properties for
your printer and document appear
the way that you want them to, click
Print to print the document.
NOTE To change the properties for
your printer, under the printer name,
click Printer Properties.
Print content
 Prerequisite: Ensure a
file is open, a printer
configured, and that you
have a martini ready!
1. Select File > Print.
Specify options, if
required.
2. Click Print.
It’s that easy. Now have
a martini.
Let’s compare approaches and content
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And the sad thing is...
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 Every. Single. Screen. Was. The. Same. Info
 Or at least, it could have been
 Even that wasn’t the case:
 Access: 1. Click the File tab, and then click Print.
 Excel
For information about previewing and printing in Excel, see:
 Preview worksheet pages before printing
 Print a worksheet or workbook
 OneNote: 1. Click the File tab, and then click Print.
 Most others follow that standard.
 In most: 2. When the properties for your printer and document
appear the way that you want them to, click Print.

Is it the tools we use?
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What is the solution?

One part is the tools we use
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 Tools are part of the problem, but a small part
 The biggest issues are:
 Legacy: But we always wrote it that way. (Um, we also “always” did
…)
 People: They think they know what your users want. They don’t. At
least, not if there isn’t research.
 So, before we get to anything with software, deal with
history and the people in the organization
 Review the past, learn from it
 Attend conferences or webinars, learn from them
 Talk to users, learn from them
 Watch how people (users, partners, competitors) do
things, and learn from them

Paragraph design
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 When publishing to online outputs, you can drop entire
paragraph types, so organize information well
 Step
 StepInfo
 StepExample
 StepResult
 Don’t write this: Select File > Print, and in the dialog box that
appears, specify options, if required, and then click Print. It’s
that easy. Now have a martini.
 Break content into logical components
 Easier to find
 Easier to update (look/feel)
 Easier to publish
 Yes, you can do a lot of this in Microsoft Word as well!

Conditional content
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 Use conditional text for
 Comments
 Watermarks
 Revision tracking (compare docs)
 Set up conditions
 Avoid overlapping if possible, but is supported
 If using FrameMaker and structure
 Manage conditions using elements, attributes and values
 Automatically apply conditions to content
 DITA also uses attributes and ditaval files
 Microsoft Word and conditions… Not so
much!

Variables
29
 Yes, it’s cool to be able to swap out the product
name
 Or the audience, or even the platform
 Now that we know it’s cool, avoid it
 You are using a tool really, really well when you do
this, but solving a problem that simply should go
away

Longer term considerations
30
Working with multiple
documents

Text insets
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 Repeated phrases
 Simple content in headers or footers
 Consider format choices when importing
 Develop multiple text flows in a single document to
store repeated phrases
 If using DITA:
 Review the use of conref

Books
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 Consider using books and sharing files, or reusing topics
(DITA?)
 Add or remove entire chapters as required
 Change numbering appearance from book
 Generate files from a book on an “as needed” basis for
specific purposes
 Build generated files, then rename them to Table of
Contents.fm or to Index.fm or to List of Figures.fm and so
on
 avoids names being based on book (i.e. Book is Europe.book so
there are EuropeTOC.fm, EuropeIX.fm and so on)
 books can not be renamed if defaults are used without renaming
generated files
 Create “super books” that contain all your files

Let’s see a sample of some of the
ideas
33
Deliver the goods

Organize and create content for your
audiences
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 Plan
 Identify what you need to write in the first place
 Once you know what you truly need, you likely write less
 The audience will appreciate it
 Form a content strategy, perform content analysis, get professional
templates, and use the tools to their full potential
 Write
 Create only the parts you identified in the plan (and get sign-offs in
writing)
 Consider topic-based (task/concept/reference) to focus the writing
 Let the SME contribute, the manager deal with issues, and technical
communicators deal with content (all types of content)
 Publish
 Deliver the right information, to the right audience, in the right format,
at the right time, and let them make the right decisions

Want to see something REALLY cool?
35

This is a very basic, normal FrameMaker file
36

It has minimal format; all “out of the box”
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What have I done so far?
 Written text
 Assigned paragraph tags
 Title, Heading1, Heading2,
Body, Numbered1,
Numbered, Indented
 Assigned character tags
 Emphasis
 Added some graphics
(screen shots, pasted right into
FrameMaker... Yes, I know,
should be referenced)
 For the purpose of the
slides I reduced them (to fit
better)
 For publish I’m using
fullsize
 Added some index
entries, all very basic stuff
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Now let’s see where we can go beyond
“default”
 First, I’ll publish it “as is”
 File > Publish
 Going to create
Responsive HTML5
output only
 Review the output
 Then I’ll mock up a better
solution to this thing
 Create some conditions
 Word
 Excel
 PowerPoint
 Apply them, and publish
the defaults
 Apply them, and publish
using Dynamic Content
Filter (which, if I may say,
is TOTALLY AWESOME!)
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What we did, and what is next
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Conclusion and contact

Recap of the session
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 It's all about the audience.
 Discussions abound about the informed consumer,
audience metrics, and personas, but how do you
actually organize and create content geared to
multiple audiences?
 Learn tips and techniques for planning, writing, and
publishing which help you deliver the right
information, to the right audience, in the right format,
at the right time, and let them make the right
decisions.

Personalized demo with YOUR content?
42
905 833 8448 (Eastern Time)
bernard@publishingsmarter.com
www.linkedin.com/in/bernardaschwanden
@publishsmarter –or– @aschwanden4stc
www.publishingsmarter.com

Delivering the Right Content to the Right Audience

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