The software development process, for the most part, tends to be fairly homogeneous. Regardless of the type of software being created, many of the same types of skills and tools are employed in a cookie-cutter fashion. This homogeneity carries over into the development of user assistance as well. Fortunately, this means that most of our skills are portable between different software domains.

Despite this, we thought it might be interesting to see what product categories Help authors are currently charged with supporting. In our survey we provided a list of common categories and asked the respondents to select those with which they are involved. The respondents were able to select more than one category. For example, a financial software app might be for internal corporate usage.

In the figure below you can see that Custom applications take the top spot with 55% support. This is in a virtual tie with Retail business products, which we further defined as "accounting, office suites, project management, etc."

Software development tools had a strong showing at 44%. Over a third of the respondents support Internal corporate applications (proprietary accounting, personnel, inventory control, etc.). Nearly 29% of Help authors are involved with Hardware support.

The other items in the question represent functional software categories. Financial was the leader at 35% followed closely by Industrial/manufacturing/ERP.