Join us for a death match unlike any you’ve ever seen before. 5 days, 5 rounds. What product help and support communities will prevail?
Due to popular demand, we’ve brought back the Death Match. This time around we’re putting two ultimate brands to the test; iPhone versus Android. Join us for a death match unlike any you’ve ever seen before. 5 days, 5 rounds. Which of the two product help sites will prevail?
We’ve enlisted two savvy content strategists & documentation folks to be our judges in this highly anticipated show down; Scott Abel and Maxwell Hoffmann. Here our two judges will compare the iPhone and Android product help sites against each other in the following criteria; User Experience, Social, Engagement and Findability. Each day is a new round and will focus on a different feature. Round 5 will take place on Fridays; Judgment Day. Judges will share their scores and crown a victorious winner for this week’s Death Match on Friday.
Each day we ask that YOU, the audience tweet and take our poll below and tell us who you think out of the two product help communities should win that round. The judges will consider your votes from each round when crowning the winner of Death Match.
Without further ado, let’s get started…
Round 1: User Experience
This year at TCWorld in Germany, Scott Abel hosted a full day of content strategy talks. The participants included an illustrious group in the content strategy space including: Ann Rockley, Charles Cooper, Rahel Ann Bailie, Geoff Roberts, Noz Urbina and Ray Gallon. Scott did an amazing job of organizing the speakers and focusing the content. This track was really relevant and valuable. It was helpful to anyone in customer support, marketing, product management and, of course, techcomm. There were two primary foci of the talks: the benefits of help and product content to digital marketing and the evolving landscape of digital publishing. Read more…
At MindTouch, most of our customers have teams in place to write their content. Occasionally, however, we do get requests from companies who want to hire writers to help develop their content. Given the fact that they’re our customers, naturally we thought it would be a good idea for the MindTouch writer following to get in on the game. If you’re a writer and have cycles to spare and would be willing to do freelance or for-hire work for our customers, tell us. We created a form below where you can submit your contact info and bio. Fill it out, click submit, and you’ll be included in the list we send to customers who want some creative talent.
We’re in the freedom business. We like users to be free to use the software and not shackled by confusion. We like software makers to be free to design and develop and not worry about how their users learn. We want support people to share their internal troubleshooting steps with users, thus freeing themselves to bite into meatier issues. And, of course, we want Tech Pubs folks to set their desktop files free and get them to the cloud. With the latest MindTouch TCS release we’ve made it possible for authors of great content using products like Adobe RoboHelp, Adobe FrameMaker and Madcap Flare to easily set their static content free on the Web. Here are the three easy steps to converting your CHM file-based help into a MindTouch TCS site.
Sarah O’Keefe of Scriptorium wrote a thoughtful article about one of our recent announcements and titled it “Curation analytics take a step forward”. In case you missed this announcement it was about us supporting publishing from Adobe RoboHelp, Adobe FrameMaker, Madcap Flare and pretty much any other tool that can publish to Compiled HTML help (CHM) format.
O’Keefe shares her concern about the round-trip story, this is wise, but it isn’t as big an issue when you realize where MindTouch fits into the publishing pipeline. Furthermore, Sarah highlights our analytics as the primary value proposition for using MindTouch, but this is only a piece of why customers love MindTouch.
Where the author laments recent updates to Firefox 5 and later versions…
First, let me start by saying, we love Firefox. That’s a sincere statement. We’ve championed them in the past and likely will again in the future. However – as I’m prone to tell my kids when they’re misbehaving – right now we’re disappointed. Here’s why.
Firefox 5+ all have serious regressions that, for customers of MindTouch, make us look bad. We have advanced features like drag-and-drop attachments of files and a slick WYSIWYG editor for editing content from your browser. Those features work brilliantly in Firefox 4 and in the current versions of Chrome, Safari, and Internet Explorer. Because Firefox 5, 6, 7, … are broken, we’ve seen an increase in support tickets related to capabilities that are now suddenly broken in MindTouch. That makes us look bad. As a company with a browser-based product in the cloud, that’s our lot in life. We get it. Suck it up and move on.
As pioneers on the Help Center frontier, what I’m going to say may strike you a bit less like Manifest Destiny and a bit more like overstaying one’s welcome. PDF’s are the way of the future.
There, I said it. I truly believe it. This post explains why.
Read more…
