Have you ever tried explaining Einstein’s theory of relativity to an 8-year old? It’s not easy, I can assure you, but it can be done. And yet, surprisingly, it isn’t the most difficult thing to try and explain. As a technical writer at DELMIA Quintiq, it’s my job to explain what our software does and how to use it and that can be a real challenge.

The way many commercial software packages (Microsoft Word, Excel; even Windows itself) turn out is sometimes a combination of some very strange features: it was built on some very old software and some of the old problems are so deeply buried that they can’t be fixed, it uses a built-in Windows feature that behaves in some very strange ways, it’s being used to do something now that the original developer never imagined it would be used for or even, occasionally, it’s broken and there’s no time to fix it before release date. That’s how bugs get to be called ‘features’.

Fortunately, nearly all the time the features to be documented in the DELMIA Quintiq software really are features, but even then you sometimes have to take your fingers off the keyboard, lean back and think to yourself “I can’t explain this, it’s simply too complicated.”  How can you explain something that’s so seemingly illogical?” It’s on days like that I fell tempted to go home and explain string theory to my youngest daughter in the hope I can at least get something right that day.

Sometimes, stepping back from the software makes you realize something else. Some of things that the DELMIA Quintiq software can do are amazingly powerful and we invest a lot of time and effort in making them usable. Despite design reviews and usability testing, sometimes you realize that when you trying to explain something it’s not your writing ability that isn’t up to the job, it’s the software that’s wrong. You are trying to explain something complex that simply shouldn’t be that difficult to use. There are enough puzzles in planning already without adding puzzles to the planning software.

It’s often said that documentation should not try to compensate for bad design. It needn’t be so extreme as actual bad design, but the technical writer is often the first person to be confronted with usability and design issues. It’s also said that you never really understand something until you try and explain it to someone else, which really puts the technical writer in the hot seat.

In a lot of companies there is a considerable distance between the software developers and the technical writers. The technical writers may work in different departments, even different continents. Here at DELMIA Quintiq, we work in the same room. If something doesn’t make sense, I can get an explanation almost instantly; if I discover something that’s broken, it gets fixed. More importantly, if I am having trouble explaining something, we can sit down and work out why. If it’s a software issue, we can change the software and make the problem simply go away. What a wonderful world it would be if our lives were like that!  This is really what you simply have to call a win-win situation; the software gets better and I actually have less to do. Good software doesn’t really need much documentation, it explains itself, but when documentation is needed, it’s important to you and us that it should be clear, usable and helpful – just like the DELMIA Quintiq software.

Now all I have to do is explain to my daughter why she can’t print her drawing in Windows 7 …