There is no question that the software development world offers a lot of excitement and challenging work. In the area of software user assistance we are particularly challenged by having to master a wide range of disciplines. From foundation skills like writing and editing—to the coding of content—to usability testing and localization, we find ourselves in a profession that is difficult to define. What is it that we really do?

The objective of this survey is to take a snapshot of our collective professional life in an attempt to identify what we value in our daily work as user assistance professionals. What emphasis do we place on writing and editing versus coding and usability testing? What platforms do we support? Which Help features are most useful? How many of us are moving to browser-based solutions? Which tools provide us with the most satisfaction? What we find out may help us to better manage our career path and to improve the quality of our work.

The Skills and Technologies Survey was published in May 2002 for a three-week period. Close to 300 people responded to our call for participation. What you have in front of you is a synthesis of the results. We’re presenting our analysis in six different sections: Skills, Technologies, Web-based Help, Windows Help, Platforms, and Tools. The links in the gold box take you to the discussions of each of these areas.

Enjoy the information. We hope it is useful to you. Please send me any feedback you have on the survey or the analysis.

Methodology

The original survey was published on the WinWriters web site for three weeks in May 2002.

We required an email address from respondents to help maintain the integrity of the submissions. As noted on that survey, we have deleted all email addresses after data tabulation to ensure respondent privacy.

This study comes with a couple of caveats. First, the majority of respondents are most likely customers of WinWriters. Most of the survey submissions came in response to email broadcasts we made to our mailing list. However, the WinWriters constituency is large and probably is a fair representation of the overall user assistance community. Second, this survey is intended to represent the interests of technical writers involved in software user assistance and may not be representative of the technical communication community at large.