Senior Technical Writer
mindwrap (formerly Blueridge Technologies)
December 1999 to January 2001
When I left my first technical writing position at Blueridge Technologies, the company was in the process of being bought by divine interVentures (now known as Data Return). My manager asked if I would be willing to telecommute from Nashville (my wife Mehera and I had moved to Nashville for her to attend graduate school), and I gladly said Yes. The buyout process took a few months, thus my short-term position at the Vanderbilt University Kennedy Center.
When I rejoined Blueridge (which had been renamed mindwrap), they also hired a second technical writer and I was given the fancy title Senior Technical Writer. Two main differences between my first tour with Blueridge and my second was that I now began to produce online documentation and provide usability feedback.
Previously, I had written print documentation and the developers had produced WinHelp-based help systems. I had heard of single-sourcing and figured we could be doing things more efficiently. I researched different solutions and proposed a FrameMaker/WebWorks solution to produce our PDF print manuals and HTMLHelp. I worked with the developers to create the hooks that would make the help systems context-sensitive. The results of my efforts were several fold:
- help content was more consistent for users
- developers could spend more time on development
- help development time was greatly reduced
I also began at this time to provide usability feedback for interface design. As a technical writer, I quickly figured out that if I had to write a lot of help content to explain how to accomplish what should have been a simple task, something was wrong. I was lucky to work with developers who appreciated a technical writer's suggestions for their interface designs. They began to seek my input, and little by little, our interfaces began to improve and the user manuals grew thinner.