Do you have important information that you need to provide to customers, users, or partners? The right information delivered at the right time in the right form can transform your products and services, ensuring positive customer experiences and successful user interactions. Good technical documentation and information support delivers a number of benefits:

• Happy, empowered customers and users
• More effective sales and marketing
• A visible competitive advantage
• Reduced support costs
• Reduced training overheads and faster ramp-up times
• Opportunities to guide user interactions with your product or service
• An ongoing channel for communications and customer relationship management

The development of good customer documentation can be a major challenge, particularly for smaller companies that cannot afford large, in-house documentation teams. Nocturne can help. We'll work with you to identify your customer information and documentation needs, design solutions, and develop appropriate information resources that are guaranteed to increase customer satisfaction, enable sales, and reduce support overheads.

Nocturne's approach is simple but effective. We typically begin with requirements analysis, a process which looks at your needs (in terms of marketing, support and user enablement) and at your customers' needs (in terms of tasks and training requirements). We map out what kinds of information must be communicated, who needs the information, and when they need it. We then select appropriate channels for delivering that information (for example, online help, printed user guides, quick reference tools, interactive training, or 'in skin' cues integrated into your software or hardware interfaces).

The result of this process is a matrix that maps users to tasks and tasks to 'information objects'. The matrix allows us to define specific requirements for each guide, quick reference card, online help system or training module, identifying its objectives, supported tasks, audience, context and contents. This matrix can be used to manage the development and delivery of customer documentation and information, and to guide the creation of templates and the authoring of training modules, documentation content, and other customer-facing materials. A detailed specification for each information object makes it easy to plan out your customer information and helps individual authors (either in-house experts or Nocturne writers) build your content.

Nocturne can provide a range of services and levels of support. If you don't have an in-house documentation team, Nocturne can step in to provide a complete turnkey solution for you, interfacing with your developers, marketing primes and support personnel and delivering finished, customer-ready documentation and training. If you do have a documentation team but need additional support, we can help by offering template development, audience and usability analysis, supplementary technical writing, online help development, training support, technical illustration, and technical editing.

Nocturne has been providing corporate communications and documentation services to the technology sector in Ottawa since 1988. We specialize in customer documentation, online help, process job aids, training support and marketing collateral. We're more than just a technical writing company. If you're looking for a local provider of advanced documentation, template support, FrameMaker, Robohelp, Forehelp, XML or single-streaming solutions, we're the answer.

In addition, we provide a single point of contact for usability testing, software development, process engineering, marketing support, and software interface testing.

Nocturne offers its services to customers on a contract or pay-per-use basis. Our InternetEdit online editing bureau gives you easy access to affordable editing and support services over the Internet. Many of our extended services are available through this website.

We're based in Ottawa but serve customers throughout Ontario.