Recently, Ben Minson stated that “Good Enough” Really Isn’t. It’s an interesting post, and I wanted to expand on the comment I left on his blog.

Ben suggests that:

If I find myself thinking “It’s good enough” on a regular basis, I—and my users—am probably not getting all that’s possible out of my work

Before I go any further, perhaps we need to clarify what “good enough” means?

My fear is that many people take “good enough” to mean, “yeah, I’m done with that and it’ll have to be good enough”. If that is the case then yes, you are selling your users, and yourself, short. However there is a perfectly valid scenario around which the phrase “good enough” could, and should, be used.

There is a classic business situation that drives the use of the phrase, it is one with which we are all familiar and which will never ever change, and that is the age old issue of high quality deliverables versus cost of delivery. It is sometimes stated in terms of Return On Investment but the bottom line is that, at a certain point, regardless of your deliverable, there comes a point where the amount you are spending on something has reached the maximum value you can expect to gain.

Finding the balance of that will, without doubt, mean that you disappoint some users. The Pareto principle is typically offered as a rule of thumb at this point (wrongly as it happens) with the presumption that “good enough” means meeting the needs of 80% of your audience, knowing that 20% will not be as well served. The reality probably that 20% of your documentation will be used but that’s for another blog post.

Ultimately whilst we would all love to provide better information, both in quantity and quality, projects have deadlines, budgets have limits and it is there we find the true definition of “good enough”. It’s up to us, as professionals, to make the most of these situations so that when we say something is “good enough”, we mean exactly that.

In their own words, the ISTC is:

the largest UK body representing professional communicators and information designers

I joined the ISTC a couple of years ago. They’ve been on my radar for a while now, but to be honest I’ve never been sure of what the benefits have been, nor have I found much need to be a member of a professional body. So what does the ISTC offer members? Well the ISTC website states that:

the ISTC offers opportunities to exchange views and information with other professional communicators. Members enjoy discounts, news, training events, networking and recognition of professional status including the use of FISTC or MISTC (for suitably qualified people).

OK, so you can now refer to me as Gordon McLean MISTC.

Yes, that’s much better than “Oi, twit!”.

I’ve been a member of various committees and charities in my time so there is one thing that I know holds true. When it comes to any organisation you get out what you put in, which would explain why I’ve recently been struggling to justify my ISTC membership.

It’s not that I don’t put in, I write a monthly column for the newsletter and happily volunteered to be on the newly formed members panel which is in the midst, thanks to the outstanding efforts of Rachel Potts reviewing those very same benefits that the ISTC offer.

And it’s not that I don’t get value back out, the ISTC mailing list has proven useful and I’m sure when I attend the conference this year, my first, I will learn a lot and benefit from speaking to my peers

So the question is, am I getting value for money?

Ultimately I believe I am, but I do feel I could be getting more. When I joined the ISTC I was already following some technical writing blogs and already had the beginnings of a network of people who were offering some good advice and interesting thoughts about this profession of ours. Some of those were discovered through the TechWR-L mailing list, others by chance encounters or links from other blogs. It’s the one thing that, as yet, the ISTC hasn’t really managed to grasp hold of, the idea that what they are facilitating is a community of like minded souls.

In a way an organisation such as the ISTC has the advantage over ad-hoc groups, given that all of the members have paid to be part of the organisation. It’ll be interesting to see the outcome of the review of member benefits, to see where the community aspect of being a member rates with everyone else. Perhaps it’s just me but I truly believe the ISTC would benefit from increasing the networking/community aspect of membership.

Technical documentation, typically, requires screenshots and I, like many, have been through the gamut of software applications that can be used. Currently I’m quite happy with Gadwin Printscreen, but recently stumbled across something a bit different.

Whilst I don’t use it at work, I have a MacBook at home and I use an application called Skitch on there to do random screengrabs and so on. It is a simple, friendly little application that is aimed at the casual user. It’s very easy to grab a screenshot, markup an area and save both image and markup to JPEG.

PrtScr is a similar kind of application for Windows, allowing a free drag and grab style screenshot capability, and the option to add simple, hand drawn markup. It’s very simplistic and whilst I seriously doubt it would find a place on the desktop of most technical communicators, it’s a nice little option if you are looking at doing something a little less formal.

To my American colleagues, who recently celebrated the 50th anniversary of their much used Strunk & White style guide, may I gently prod you in the direction of this article by Geoffrey Pullum of the Language Log.

I’ve seen Professor Pullum speak, hilariously, about english grammar and whilst I’m certain that he could find many issues with the content I publish here, I’m certain he would never be nasty or vindictive in his comments. However, in this post, in which he responds to some of the people who have commented about his article, he proves that he has the wit and style to handle such things. Both are well worth a read, even if you don’t agree with his point of view.

It’s safe to say that I’m fully hooked into the Web 2.0 world. I manage my email, calendar and task list online, as well as write and share the occasional document. I blog (in three places), I twitter, and I follow a wide swathe of information via RSS feeds. If the internet disappeared overnight I’d be lost, for any time I think ‘information’ I think internet, I don’t think book, or library, or even online help. I think internet.

This is even more prevalent when I’m looking for a solution, an answer to my current burning issue. At that point I’m looking for information from my peers, from other users or anyone else who has had, and solved, a similar problem, and nine times out of ten I’ll turn to the internet to search for that information.

Whilst such answers can be hard to track down, it feels productive to be searching for the specific answer to my specific issue, even if that takes some time and effort on my part. Once I’ve found an answer I’ll usually do a little bit of double checking – perhaps others have added a comment to say that it worked for them – and then I’m happy to accept that it is correct, knowing that if it’s not I can always head back to Google and start again. Caveats apply here, of course, depending on the severity of the issue I’m dealing with.

My point is that I freely trust the information I find based on some cursory checks, I am fully hooked into the Web 2.0 world and believe in the wisdom of the crowd (thankfully I have evidence of this as well, it’s not all hearsay).

Providing information and answers is a key part of our job as technical communicators but I am concerned that my view of the information world and how I use it may be tainting my thoughts. Do the people who use the information we produce really want to ‘just google’ for information? Am I projecting the way I think and work onto the people who use our documentation?

The obvious answer is to ask those people, and I’m in the fairly lucky position that I can do just that. A large portion of our documentation is used by our own staff, so I have direct access to my audience. So, obviously, I should just ask them: “How would you like to access the documentation?”

But I think that’s the wrong question.

Whilst it will be useful to hear the answers to that question, it is far too open ended and, to repeat an old adage, ‘the customer doesn’t always know what the customer wants’. Instead I need to figure out what the most common usage scenario is and work from that, before presenting a limited set of choices from which the audience can make an informed decision.

One thing is certain, the way I access information, the way I think about how information is structured and presented, from my professional background and my knowledge of some of the information design theories that are in use, is very different from the way I use information in my day to day life. The more I find myself leaning towards more ad-hoc, random and casual sources of information, the more I begin to wonder if the world of the professionally written and presented technical communications needs to change tack and find a comfortable middle ground, embracing all that is good about the web 2.0 internet.

Social media works because it is based on people and the availability of information (and metadata about that information). It seems all too obvious that the world of technical communications needs to make bigger strides in that direction. Many technical writers have started that journey, and whilst it means yet another set of skills that you’ll need to learn, ultimately it means that the technical information you produce will be more valuable in the longer term.