Communities are all about similarities and shared interests. The user assistance community is no exception and WritersUA would like to help our community members know each other a little better. The QuickPoll provides a monthly snapshot of various aspects of our professional lives. This article is a regularly updated archive of each of our past polls. Accompanying the results of each poll is a quick personal analysis from WritersUA President, Joe Welinske. Please send Joe any comments regarding these polls or the analysis.
If you have contributed to the QuickPoll, thank you! If you haven’t tried it out yet, we invite you to start today. The QuickPolls are a central fixture of our home page.
Links to the results and analysis of our past QuickPoll questions:
This survey was conducted Sept. 20 - Dec. 13, 2005.
One of the realities of work life is that just about everyone has a boss. No matter how far you progress in an organization, there always seems to be someone one step higher on the totem pole. Many of use have a good working relationship with the boss our boss. Others find having someone looking over our their shoulder to be daily a challenge. Even if there are conflicts, a good boss will be able to help you to exceed in whatever you are charged with accomplishing. For this poll, we asked how effective your boss is at helping you to succeed. Over forty percent had a positive feeling about the boss, defnining that person as Very Important or Indispensable to your success. 23% sent a moderate amount of credit toward the boss. Close to a third felt the positive impact of a superior was minimal.
This survey was conducted February 14 - April 19, 2005.
The daily commute to our workplaces is generally a waste of time for most of us. Sure, you might enjoy listening to the car radio or reading the paper on the train. But that is just helping us pass the time. I've never heard anyone brag about how long they get to spend in transit. Usually we are trying to minimize the coming and the going so we can spend more time at our personal pursuits. For many workers, the daily commute has become longer and longer. In pursuit of affordable homes, the exurbs have added significant distances to that commute. For this poll question we wanted to find out how much time our community spends on the daily journey.
The results show that half of us require a maximum of thirty minutes to get to work. Only ten percent face an hour or more each way. That matches up with overall results from the U.S. Census Bureau. Not suprisingly, the location and the time of day of your commute are the prime factors in how long it takes. Flexible schedules in the IT industry probably give our community a bit of an edge in smoothing out the drive-time edge.
This survey was conducted January 26 - February 13, 2005.
The type of environment in which we toil away on a daily basis is an important aspect of how well we work and how much we enjoy it. In most organizations there is the option to customize our environment with music. So we asked you, "How often do you listen to music while you're working?" Only 18% of the 485 respondents never listen to any music at work. So the large majority of us find it enjoyable to some extent. Of course, what we listen to and how we do it varies with each individual. Personally, I really like energetic, popular music when I'm doing tedious, mechanical work, but I prefer low-volume instrumentals when I'm writing and editing. The way in which we listen to music has certainly been revolutionized by digital media. The proliferation of mp3s and iPods has made it possibly to have a jukebox of seemingly limitless inventory right inside our computers.
This survey was conducted December 17, 2004 - January 25, 2005.
For this poll we took a quick look at what we like to do when we're not working. Forty-seven percent of respondents picked "Reading" as their most desired leisure activity. Since the constituency of this web site is centered around documentation specialists, it is not too surprising that reading was the top pursuit selected from this short list. "Watching Movies" came in a distant second, followed closely by "Playing a Sport", "Family Gathering", and "Gardening". It turns out that reading is at the top of the national list for leisure activities as well. The Harris Poll takes a yearly look at what we do in our spare time.
This survey was conducted November 2 - December 16, 2004
The software industry is generally considered to be made up of a relatively transient population. It is common for people to leapfrog through numerous jobs in their career. Sometimes it is for a better opportunity; many times due to a layoff. It is a volatile employment market. The last few years have seen even more movement with the high number of business failures and large-scale layoffs. On the other hand, I know many people who have been with the same software company (mostly big ones) for over twenty years. Our poll question looked to measure the job duration for people in our user assistance community. The results show that 42% of us have hung on to the same job since at least 1999. Another 23% have stayed with the same organization since just before the burst of the Internet bubble. Jack Molisani is the founder or ProSpring Technical Staffing. Jack's view of these results is that "Companies that understand
the value of user assistance also realize that it takes a certain
investment to train–and retain–user assistance experts. There is a good chance that the companies who didn't think user
assistance was worth doing well were the same companies that didn't survive
the dot com crash. The same might be said of the user assistance professionals
themselves–those who took the time (and cost) to become experts in user assistance were able to find work and stay employed."
It is definitely still a tough time for jobs in the Information Technology sector—getting one in the first place and holding on to the one you've got. A recent survey by a University of Chicago researcher painted a fairly dismal picture of the loss of tech jobs over the past three years. While there are glimmers of recovery, this is still a time when it is important to evaluate where you stand within your own organization. In our QuickPoll, we asked you to assess your situation and tell us how highly your role is valued at work. A third of you feel pretty secure, identifying your role as either Very Important (29%) or Indispensable (7%). Another 38% rated their value as Moderate. That totals 74% of respondents expressing confidence that their work offers a good amount of substance to their employer. The 18% feeling they offer minimal value are hopefully looking for other opportunities. The 6% who are "Not sure" might want to make some inquiries around the water cooler regarding their status. Of course, answers to this type of question are always vulnerable to our personal outlook. Pessimists may see pink slips in their dreams while optimists will fail to see the floor falling out from under them.
Getting through the day is tough without the appropriate liquid refreshments. For many of us, the morning cup of java or mid-day Coke is a regular, comforting ritual. In this poll we asked what beverage you prefer to help keep your synapses firing while at work. The basic fluid of life—water—showed up as the top vote-getter with 38%. That probably makes the water bottlers very happy. Not many people seem to drink tap water anymore. Coffee was a clear second place with 29% of us clicking with caffeine. Tea and soft drinks tied at 14%. Hardly anyone appears to drink juice.
For most of us, the top issues in selecting employment are related to financial compensation, location, and professional satisfaction. We rarely have the opportunity to learn much about our working conditions—especially co-workers—in advance of accepting a position. Yet the people we work with have a lot to do with how much we enjoy our time at the office. Most of us have had to deal with people at work that we otherwise would have steered well clear of in other aspects of life. To balance that, it is always a bonus when we are fortunate to develop strong friendships at work.
So our question for this poll was to find out how many of us have found close friends in this environment. We had a large response from over 700 people. The results can be viewed from both the glass half-full or half-empty perspectives. On the half-empty side, forty percent of us have no close friends at work. However, three out of five of us have had great success making friends. Just over a third of the respondents have at least one or two close friends with whom they can share the highs and lows that we experience at the workplace.
An interesting aspect of polls is how few responses are needed before you start to hit a steady state of results. The percentages reflected in this "passion" poll have been almost identical since the first fifty or so responses we received. I was personally hoping the results would skew toward a higher passion level as the sample increased. Unfortunately, it seems as though many of us are mired in less than exciting positions at the moment. Sixty percent of respondents indicated a lukewarm affinity for their position—or worse.
The current economic situation in the software industry is likely a major contributor to the lack of heat in our jobs. We have experienced unprecedented layoffs and permanent job losses. Those still employed have had to inherit projects from those let go. Another side of effect of this difficult economy is that new projects have been put on hold. The bonfire of positive energy we experienced in the late 90's has unfortunately been dampened as we concentrate on how to get the basics done as quickly and cheaply as possible. As the economy improves, we can hope that increased competition will again have us pushing the envelope of user assistance to set our products and services apart from that of the competition.
In many offices, one of the top topics of conversation with co-workers is what we're going to do when we finally get time off. The software industry can take its toll on our emotional and mental health and a little bit of free time can be an enormous relief. But how much time is enough? And do we take the time that is coming to us? In this QuickPoll we asked how much vacation time you take and we specifically emphasized "take" as opposed to "earn."
Over five hundred of you responded to our query. The results show that almost a third of us, 29%, enjoy a comfortable month away from the grind. Another third are gifted with three weeks. That's certainly enough time to take a couple of nice trips each year—even if the destination is our back yard. Then again, three weeks isn't really enough to satisfy an international wander lust and it may not make up for a year's worth of meeting stressful ship dates.
A third of the respondents receive two weeks or less of vacation. But in the United States it often takes at least a year of service to receive two weeks of vacation time and three to four years to bump it up to three weeks or more. In contrast, several European countries put a high priority on extended leave. According to the Work to Live web site, Sweden, France, Italy, and Spain all average five to six weeks of vacation!
You're probably familiar with the Louis Sullivan architectural maxim that form follows function. In the world of technical communication, you could say that form enables function. Our carefully chosen words are made useful in specific contexts by applying models of usage and presentation. Beyond the basics of grammar and punctuation, we relay on stylistic rules to help us in the appropriate use of abbreviations, acronyms, terms, font choice, spacing, ordering of information, numbering format, and much more. Publications like the Chicago Manual of Style provide us with rules for a core foundation and documents like the Microsoft Manual of Style offer recommendations at the software platform level. But possibly most important is the development of a guide customized for our own body of work. A formal style guide can be used to ensure consistency in a given document, throughout the broader documentation set, and beyond our own projects to incorporate the look and feel established for an entire organization.
The definition of what constitutes a style guide will obviously vary considerably from organization to organization. For some of us, the guide might be a very detailed, often updated publication. Others may do fine with a just a few pages of text covering the most important aspects unique to our own writing environment. And then there are those for whom a style guide is simply a waste of time. When we asked you to rank the importance of a formal style guide, we received an extremely large response with 725 of you contributing your opinion. Thirty percent of respondents indicated a formal style guide was Indispensable. A resounding three-quarters of you felt that it was at least Very Important. Maybe more surprising than the positive support for formal style guides is the fact that only 2% of respondents do not use a style guide at all. It is clear that we feel strongly that this is an important component of our work.
As the development of web-based user assistance continues to grow, the underlying technologies become more and more important to our work. JavaScript is one of those key technologies. It has become the engine that powers much of the interaction and automation of our web-based systems, including user assistance components. Your personal level of experience and knowledge about JavaScript can expand your options or limit your contributions to a project. To find out more about our collective capabilities in this area, we used our QuickPoll to ask you to rate your JavaScript skill.
Only 11% of respondents indicated having no knowledge of JavaScript. There are certainly areas of software user assistance that do not rub shoulders with JavaScript and therefore no need to understand it. However, it is always good to prepare for future projects. At a minimum, it is wise for us to have at least rudimentary knowledge of JavaScript, if for no other reason than being able to participate in discussions about its use with programmers and other tech writers. Eighteen percent of the respondents are moving in that direction by experimenting with JavaScript.
A third of us responded as having the ability to cut and paste code. This is the level where most of us need to be and you could certainly make an argument for this to now be a core competency for user assistance professionals. A few hours of training and practice with JavaScript is all it takes to understand how to embed existing scripts and calls to scripts in our content pages. It also allows us to evaluate the suitability of a script for our intended task. The result is more control and flexibility in our work.
The next plateau is the ability to craft our own scripts from scratch. Achieving the ability to create original scripts requires additional training time and practice. Even basic scripting must confront the issues of cross-browser compatibility, processing efficiency, and testing. For publication groups with relatively simple JavaScript needs, a team member is often groomed to fill this role. A suprisingly respectable 24% of respondents placed themselves in this category.
The highest level of competency is to be fluent in the JavaScript language. This means understanding all of the design and implementation constructs and being able to fly solo comfortably. Many larger publications departments have found the need to have at least one team member be the JavaScript guru. Often this person is someone who has switched career tracks from programming into technical communication. Eleven percent of the respondents placed themselves in this category and you are very fortunate if you have one of these folks on your team.
In difficult economic times like these, most of us are just happy to have a job. Some benefits like health club memberships, lavish ship-date parties, and generous stock options are now just a faint blip on the perquisite radar. Other benefits like health care, educational subsidies, and flex-time continue to be important determiners of why we choose to work where we do. The latter benefit, a flexible work schedule, makes it easier to coordinate work with family, to take care of important errands, and to generally enjoy a saner pace in our lives. For most American workers, flex-time is just a dream. Hours are fixed and strict. But what is it like for the members of our user assistance community? We used our QuickPoll to ask, "How flexible are your work hours?"
Over 700 people responded to this question, so the results are likely to be a very accurate assessment. Fifty-two percent of us indicated either more than enough flex-time time or as much as needed. Another 27% are getting just enough. So for eight out of ten of us, a key job condition is very satisfactory.
One of the most enduring components of books has been the Table of Contents. The venerable TOC offers an insight to the uninitiated on the nature, organization, and scope of the information it represents. Particularly with reference works, the TOC offers an invaluable shortcut to finding the information we are looking for. While generally associated with the needs of "novices," a TOC is valuable to anyone with limited domain knowledge about the subject at hand. However, as print publication have given way to online media, the TOC has fallen in favor while the use of full-text Search continues to grow. The two navigation methods offer differing and complimentary solutions, but that is often ignored in the debate on their usefulness.
So how do software user assistance professionals value the TOC? Our QuickPoll asked "How important is a Table of Contents to an online user guide?" The result of 484 respondents was overwhelmingly in favor of the TOC with over three quarters of the respondents describing it as Invaluable or Very Important. Cynics would suggest that this reflects a tendency for pubs professionals to hold on to what they know—even if outmoded. That may be true. But you can also take the position that smart people tend to want to do smart things. The TOC is not for every user and it doesn't have to be. For those who need it, it is an invaluable device. A good golfer may rarely pull out the sand wedge, but there will always be one in the bag.
For many of us, one of the less than thrilling aspects of our work day is sitting in meetings. Some of these gatherings may be more interesting than others, many may result in tangible benefits, but there are few of us who look forward to them. Despite this, you can still make a strong case for meetings. When a group needs to have a substantive, in-depth discussion, brainstorm ideas, gather consensus, develop a schedule, or deal with team morale, face-to-face meetings are hard to beat. Most of us understand the benefits, but we still hope the meetings we attend are efficient, productive, and minimize the time away from our prime responsibilities.
To find out how much time we spend in these gatherings, our QuickPoll asked: "How many hours do you spend in face-to-face meetings in a typical work week." The results show that a quarter of us are only involved in the very manageable amount of less than two hours per week—over half of us less than four hours. Project leads and managers most likely make up the 18% involved in meeting for more than a day each week. Advances in technology may eventually eliminate the in-person roundtables, but it probably won't be soon and we'll probably lose some intangibles by doing so.
As user assistance professionals, our daily work is consumed with enhancing our software products to provide our customers with the best possible experience. We spend countless hours designing assistance elements, writing effective content, and making it all mesh with the rest of the development team. Ideally we are doing all this with a clear understanding of who are customers are and what their needs consist of. But how much do we know about our users? Are we doing all that we can to begin our efforts with an informed customer profile in hand?
Our question asked for the primary method of non-sales contact that you have with users regarding their needs. For many of us it is apparently very little. A third indicate that they have no contact with their users. At least some contact with customers would seem necessary regardless of your tech pubs job function. On the other end of the spectrum, 19% respond that face-to-face contact was their primary method. These folks are much more likely to be on target in effectively servicing their customers. Focus groups and interviews can be extremely revealing. Contact through email is listed by 22%. It would be interesting to know whether that means just receiving emails, or if it's used as a mechanism to interact with the customer.
As user assistance professionals, much of our work involves the crafting of words and sentences into useful communications to our customers. In our WritersUA Skills and Technology Surveys, the user assistance community has placed "writing procedures" at the top of the Most Valued Skills list three years running. It is clear that we and our employers value this foundation skill of technical communication. But how much time do we actually spend cranking out content?
For this QuickPoll, we asked how much of your work week is spent on writing content. We specified "content" to distinguish from report writing, composing emails, etc. The results we received were distributed along the full range from 16% of us spending minimal time writing to 9% developing content full-time. This probably reflects the variations in our job descriptions and our role within our respective departments.Those reporting the lower percentages may be managers, testers, or coding specialists. Despite all the focus we tend to put on the technology aspects of our professions, it's comforting to see that over half of us spend more than 50% of our time writing.
The depressed U.S. economy was certainly one of the hot topics of discussion going into 2002. The dot com implosion, corporate accounting fraud, and global political instability have kept the stock market shaky and capital investment minimal. Almost all facets of the economy were hard hit with the software industry really suffering. The lack of demand resulted in massive layoffs and large number of business closures. User assistance professionals have taken the hit right along with everyone else.
Despite all of this, every organization is different and we wanted to find out what your personal view is for the future. We asked what you felt the prospects were for your own company in 2002. The answer was very positive. Even with all the surrounding turmoil, almost two-thirds indicate they are cautiously optimistic or very optimistic. Only 9% are very pessimistic. The results for this question might be skewed positive since a natural inclination is to have faith in our employer. Or it might just be that we are seeing the light at the end of the tunnel.
One of the hot buzzwords of the software industry is certainly XML-the acronym for the eXtensible Markup Language. XML provides a format for the sharing of data between all manners of other software languages and environments. Like HTML, XML is an open standard developed and promoted by the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C). While HTML requires user assistance professionals to acquire at least a cursory understanding of the markup code, XML is most likely to be manipulated strictly with tools. For many of us, our interaction with actual XML code may be only a few snippets of code, or possibly just a template or specification. The greater impact of XML will be on the way we design and manage our content.
Our QuickPoll checked to see how much you think XML will impact your work. Nearly half of the respondents believe the technology is ripe and expect XML to have a large effect. A third think it will have little or no effect, and the jury is still out for 11%. With only 6% of us unfamiliar with XML, it is clear that the word is out on this emerging standard.
Telecommuting is the wave of the future, right? For the employer it reduces the load on facilities, for the employee it reduces the amount of time lost to physical commuting. With respect to user assistance professionals, one would expect we are ripe candidates for this type of work environment. Being part of the software industry would seem to eliminate technical telecommunication hurdles. And work products like user documentation and Help files seem particularly well suited to a home office.
The results of our QuickPoll certainly don't match those assumptions. Of the 544 respondents, nearly half indicated they never telecommute. Just 40% of us telecommute a moderate amount-from a few hours to two workdays per week. Only 12% conduct most of their weekly work away from the main office. Numerous possible reasons exist for this seemingly low telecommuting rate. In a fast-paced development environment, there is a practical need for daily face-to-face collaboration with co-workers. Security issues can make working through a firewall impractical. And many managers are simply uncomfortable with having their employees out of view.
A common topic of conversation for many of us is how much time we put into our jobs every week. For some it's a badge of honor, for others it's a sore point. Week in and week out we move from manic Monday through hump day and finish it out with TGIF. The amount of time we invest in our jobs was the subject of this QuickPoll.
While the general public tends to link software workers with agonizingly long hours, it doesn't appear to be the case with the user assistance community. Half of the respondents to our QuickPoll indicated a traditional work week of 40 to 44 hours. Fully 80% work between 35 and 49 hours. Only 11% are harnessed to a heavy work load of 50+ hours.
The number of hours that we work probably varies a lot depending on the organization. Startup companies tend to require longer hours at deferred pay while more mature organizations can allow workers to pace themselves. Also, software development cycles impose periods of very intense work. While 40 hours per week may be the norm, that number might ratchet quickly upward as we approach ship dates for our products.
We offer the QuickPolls via the WritersUA web site home page. They are open to anyone and do not require any identifying information. The polls simply collect responses and are not scientific in data collection or analysis. Most user participation comes in response to emailings to WritersUA customers.