Contemplation

Topic Orientation and Reuse

I was in a meeting a few weeks back when the question of content reuse came up. Does topic based documentation really increase our ability to reuse content? What is the return on the up-front investment in user analysis and content planning? I decided to create a simple scenario showing the potential for use.

Consider the following documentation requirement: Your company, Southern Specialty Foods Inc., is trying to introduce “Southern Special Grits” and “Southern Special Quick Grits” (Southern corn based staple in the United States) in the emerging markets. You are required to write a user guide for a box of grits.

Now if you were in India, you'd have no idea what grits were, how to cook them and when to eat them.... Given a box with terse instructions, you would probably just grit your teeth!

So how do we go about documenting this in a way that users can understand and also leave the door open for reuse?

Topic Orientation

Let's try to create a content plan. The user probably wants to understand what grits are. What is the user going to attempt with a box of grits...cook it of course. So, its probably a good idea to show a basic recipe first and move onto more exotic variations later. The topic pool and content layout could be something like this:

Topic Reuse

As you can see, we have reused certain topics ("About Southern Specialty Foods, Inc.", "What are Grits?", "Jazzing Up your Grits") in multiple guides (topic maps).

Multiple Delivery Channels

Consider the task topic that shows how to cook grits. Wouldn't it be nice to create a video that showed how to cook grits?

Voila!

My graphics skills leave a lot to be desired , but hopefully I have made a point. The contents of the task topic "Cooking Southern Special Quick Grits" have been reused to create multimedia content.

Localization

We have addressed the English speaking emerging markets...but what about China, Brazil etc.? The "Southern Special Grits Guide" and the "Southern Special Quick Grits Guide" need to be localized in several languages. Instead of localizing the guides separately, it is now possible to localize topics in the topic pool. Thus the topics common to both guides have to be localized only once! This is huge in terms of reducing localization costs.

We have seen that well designed topics can be reused across products to deliver content via multiple delivery channels in various formats (like product documentation, training, support, HTML, PDF, screencasts). Localization savings can add up noticeably. There are many other avenues of reuse too - across products, platforms, audiences etc. "Write Once, Use Anywhere....", well, ahem..ahem... almost!

One of the unique selling propositions of Darwin Information Typing Architecture (DITA) is content reuse via topic based documentation and minimalism. Of course, such reuse may be possible with other structured formats like DocBook etc. The key is topic orientation.

I hope this article elucidates the potential of topic orientation and reuse. If nothing else, you now know something about grits!

Posted at 06:00AM Jul 01, 2008 by Sowmya Kannan in Sun  |  Comments[1]