A few months ago we conducted a survey of over 300 Technical Communicators from a cross section of industries and company sizes. The results surprised us.
Not only did we learn that most Technical Communicators believe that in order to use Wiki’s you needed to know Wiki text, but that they were rarely using any web based tools for documentation.
More surprisingly, we also learned that most technical communicators didn’t know about Darwin Information Typing Architecture (DITA). IBM must be upset.
Take a look at the infographic below which begins to highlight the key findings of our survey.
Feel free to contact me if you want to learn more about our findings.
Were there any surprises for you? Please give us your comments below.
(Cross-posted @ MintdTouch )
Mark – kudos on the great graphic – very interesting.
However, where is your user sampling coming from? How could Adobe FrameMaker not be on this list?
It is absolutely a leader in structured tech doc (at least in high tech corps) – and XML tools are also quite common in large corps with heavy translation requirements.
Word – yes, leader in random doc/draft passing – but not official product doc output for tech writers, I don’t think.
I could argue (and do argue) with you that single-source with a collaborative Wiki is a MUCH smarter better non-linear non-email-review-passing better approach, but unfortunately at current, this is for the adventurous tech writer that wants to do things in a better way, since the tools are not end-to-end supporting yet (yet pieces are filling in)
Fortunately some tools do help in these translations… and process and the industry is slowly moving this way.. slowly.
Framemaker is on the list just farther down. If you segment the data by company size, the results start to change. Yet, MS Word is still the dominant authoring tool in all segments. I wish I was making this stuff up, but sadly no, it’s true.