Particularly from the perspective of interface design and what you would do if you had to meet the challenge of giving a user help if they were interacting with it and had a question about it.

Certainly some sort of "Getting Started" piece of paper or small leaflet needs to go with it so people know how to activate it, charge up the batteries, and so on. But once they are out in the street and they want to know how to add a new email contact, for example, what then? Yes, you could rely on the fact it has Internet access and stick the files on the Apple web-site somewhere. It's also a good way to annoy people when they can't get to the Internet for whatever reason.

And look at that screen. How many characters can you fit on that thing? Even if we say to ourselves the target audience is going to be 90% 20-Somethings with excellent vision, you might be able to get, what, 100 characters per page? 150? And if you decide to use an accompanying graphic, then 40? 70? And if the target audience is going to be 90% 20-Somethings, even 70 characters might be pushing their attention span.

(Maybe I am ancient and cynical. What about it?)

Then, if you decide to do some research and actually download the intro to the iPhone movie from Apple and have a look at it, you realize that it doesn't really need that much online help.

Firstly, they've built the interface so that it mimics how you interact with physical objects. You press buttons. You drag things with your fingers.

Secondly, they've used simple base icons wherever they can. Clicking on a plus sign lets you add things. Clicking on a red circle with a white bar through it beside one of your contacts starts the process of deleting that contact. Everything is very driven by the interface.

Now, Apple is what I consider the leader in interface design, starting with computers, and through to the iPhone. So then you have to ask yourself, what is my role going to be as a technical communicator? And maybe you have to think that if you want to get into working on products like this, you will have to move very strongly into design concepts and further away from writing words to describe tasks and knowledge.

This isn't a new trend. I attended a WinWriters conference years ago where someone described how they got improved user acceptance for a home entertainment installation guide by basically ripping out all the text and replacing it with pictures, arrows, and other visual cues. This was a unit that had very complex wiring and a bunch of options on how to set it up. The old manual turned people off the product, the new "Manual" turned people back on.

So, as we go to Web 2.0 with all that implies, what does it mean to you as a technical communicator?

://www.apple.com/iPhone/