From product centric to process centric documentation
The trends in documentation of the past 20 years are under heavy influence of the development of internet technology. Like with the web – where we distinguish between Web 1.0, Web 2.0 and 3.0 - we can see three phases in documentation. Product centric documentation The first phase is the phase in which we technical communicators worked with tools like Pagemaker, QuarkXPress or Framemaker. In this phase we are very much focussed on a single product and there is a constant struggle between task and function based documentation. If our customer needs a manual for a product, we write one – as an isolated process. Our focus is on the product and generic audience groups and not on things like re-use or efficient use of available information. Compare it to the story of the little prince, where the author makes three drawings of a sheep – each sheep could be a version of a product; with us technical communicators writing a separate manual for every version. Sure we see the similarities and do