The 2004 WritersUA Skills and Technologies Survey
Skills • Technologies • Platforms • Tools • Survey Home
Since the creation of Microsoft's WinHelp fifteen years ago, user assistance professionals have increasingly relied on authoring tools to assist us in our daily work. Today with our more diversified documentation set, the number of tools we regularly use has become quite sizeable. Which tools do most of us find useful? Which tools provide us with the most satisfaction? This portion of the survey supplies you with a peer review to assist you in planning your tool acquisitions.
You can find links to all of these tools in the Tools section of the WritersUA User Assistance Resource Directory.
We presented respondents with a list of commonly used tools and asked them to provide us with a satisfaction rating for the ones they used. From that data we also identified the percentage of respondents using a particular tool.
Adobe Acrobat (91%) leads the pack with nine out of ten of us using that tool. Acrobat PDF is listed in the Technologies section of this report as the most valued of all our technologies. So it's not surprising to see Acrobat here as a popular authoring tool.
FrameMaker (65%) is very popular because of its robust capabilities for large-scale documentation development and its support for XML and PDF.
RoboHelp (65%) dominates the Help authoring space with nearly two-thirds of the respondents using one or more versions of the popular Macromedia (formerly eHelp) product. Microsoft's HTML Help Workshop (41%) is a free utility that provides basic support for HTML Help authoring.
Paint Shop Pro (60%) has many competitors in the entry-level graphics market, but its free-trial-version program, aggressive pricing, and ease of use have put it into the hands of well over half of us. Snagit (54%) and PhotoShop (44%) are two other popular image manipulation utilities.
Web-specific authoring tools have a presence. Dreamweaver (37%) and FrontPage (33%) are the most popular choices.
WebWorks Publisher from Quadralay (30%) rounds out the top ten authoring tools.
Note: Past surveys had consistently shown that well over 90% of respondents use Microsoft Word. We left Word off this year's survey to make room for other UA specific tools.
Our perceptions of the tools we use is also an important consideration. Respondents indicated the value they placed on a particular tool they used by rating it from 1 (low) to 5 (high). The following chart shows the top-ranked tools based upon what percentage of votes they received with ratings of 4 or 5.
