The 2006 WritersUA Skills and Technologies Survey
Skills • Technologies • Platforms • Tools • Survey Home
Since the creation of Microsoft's WinHelp sixteen years ago, user assistance professionals have increasingly relied on 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 (93%) leads the pack with over 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 tool.
RoboHelp (63%) continues to dominate the Help authoring space, despite not having a new release in many years. Nearly two-thirds of the respondents use one or more versions of the popular Adobe product.
FrameMaker (57%) is very popular because of its robust capabilities for large-scale documentation development and its support for XML and PDF.
Paint Shop Pro and SnagIt are tied for the market share lead in the entry-level graphics market. PhotoShop (41%) is another popular image manipulation utilities.
Microsoft's HTML Help Workshop (33%) is a free utility that provides basic support for HTML Help authoring.
Web-specific authoring tools have a presence. Dreamweaver (39%) and FrontPage (26%) are the most popular choices.
The Captivate Demo tool (26%) from Adobe has entered the top ten this year.
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.
Other tools with significant representation were: WebWorks Publisher (25%), FullShot (18%), Flare (16%), FAR (14%), Flash MX (13%), AuthorIT (11%), Doc-to-Help (9%), and ArborText (8%).
The following tools received numerous mentions: Illustrator, Camtasia, Corel Draw, FireWorks, ForeHelp, Help & Manual, HyperSnap, Mif2Go, Visio, and XMetal.
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.
