What’s in a name?

27 Jul

Posted by Scott as documentation, online help, user assistance

dog tags We love slapping tags on things. A name gives us an idea of what those things are supposed to do, and also allows us to add a bit of gravity or levity to that thing. Take the world of tech comm, for example. How many different titles have you heard for the job we do? Technical writer, technical communicator, documentation specialist, documentation engineer, technical publishing specialist, technical author, guy or gal who writes the manuals that no one reads.

Why so many different names for what’s essentially the same thing? A variety of reasons, like wanting something that’s potentially staid or stale to sound fresh, dynamic, or trendy. And you can’t discount the desire to make something — like a job title — sound more important than perhaps it actually is.

There’s no denying, though, that a name can affect the perception of something — whether it’s a job title or the name of a product. And that goes for documentation as well.

I’ve always had a sneaking feeling that the tags we attach to documentation have the potential to unnecessarily taint it. As I mentioned in a previous post, people have had bad experiences with documentation — once bitten, twice shy as it were.

Learning from Toodledo

Last week, this feeling really happy slapped me when (for reasons I can’t recall) I found myself at the Web site of Toodledoo. It’s an online to do list that’s touted as being easy to use. I can’t attest to that, since I don’t use Toodledo — Remember the Milk is my to do list app of choice.

What struck me wasn’t the app itself, but the way in which the user assistance was presented. There are two links. First, the obvious one: Help. The second, and more interesting of the two, was Learning Center. Not user assistance. Not documentation. Not manual. Learning Center.

The Learning Center is a portal to articles, news, user forums, and frequently-viewed help topics. It combines many of the elements of documentation generated by a company and by the company’s customers in one spot. Admittedly, I’d probably do things a little differently; I’d get rid of the Help link, have all documentation available through the Learning Center page, and probably work with a designer to redesign the page.

What this could mean to the user

My thoughts about the execution aside, Toodledo’s Learning Center struck a chord with me. It’s a simple idea, but one that can have subtle but profound implications for the people who use Toodledo.

Think of the implications of that choice of names in the eyes and minds of the user. Learning Center doesn’t have staid, stale, and possible portentous ring that all the other monickers for documentation potentially carry. With the Learning Center, you’re not telling people how to use an application. You’re not showing them how to use an application. You’re teaching ways in which to get the most out of an application.

It’s user assistance, which offers the perception of being user friendly. On top of that, if you do it right — by incorporating forums and/or a wiki — you can potentially leverage the knowledge of your community of users to make the Learning Center (or whatever you call it) even more useful.

So, what’s in a name? Perhaps a lot more than we realize.

Thoughts? Feel free to leave a comment.

Photo from http://sxc.hu