Communicating Technical Information through Visual Content (Comic Books!)

I recently worked with a small user assistance team at Microsoft to develop and prototype new form factors for presenting and publishing help content. Based on market research, we focused on comics and Silverlight-driven interactive experiences (more on that in a later post).

The comics were a fun project that garnered a lot of feedback and interest at several IT conferences. Each comic featured two characters, Leah and Zach, along with their light-hearted guide, Squishy (a stress ball come to life). To move the story forward, Leah and Zach were assigned typical tasks, such as automating the administration of the operating system and applications, combating virtual sprawl, and addressing concerns over moving to the Cloud. At the outset of this pilot project our goals were to:

• Improve customer satisfaction in Japan (we will share Japanese versions of the comics in a later post)
• Connect with IT Professionals under 30
• Entertain and engage people who may be curious about, but a little intimidated by, technology
• Get customers interested so that they dig deeper into the technology

We hope that you’ll enjoy the comics and find them useful. Feel free to distribute them (electronically and otherwise) and please let us know what you think. Do you like them? Obviously we’re not the only company to do this, but we want to know what you think and if you want to see more of this type of content? Do you prefer learning though comics as opposed to more traditional documentation? Some customers suggested the comics could be used as classroom educational tools, learning guides for user groups, and as casual desktop references (for example, the PowerShell comic). Here are some customer quotes from TechEd North America and TechEd Japan, 2010:

• “Nice way to humanize PowerShell.”
• “A great opportunity for reaching young people”
• “A newbie will keep this at their desk.”

In this first post, we’ve included the front cover and back cover of two of our comics below – please take a look! Reading your comments, we realized that in our previous post we had very small thumbnails. We've fixed that, so now you can get a better look at what we've done. Stay tuned in the coming weeks as we release all of the panels for all three of our comics.

In the next post we’ll describe how we developed our characters and early panels. In subsequent posts, we’ll show how we went from script to whiteboard to storyboard to final panels, how we developed a customized Silverlight application for online comic viewing, and the reaction we had in Japan to the project. As you read these posts, if you have any questions about the project or the process, let us know and we’ll talk about that as well. Your comments and participation in this blog will help set future direction for this project and other visual content efforts at Microsoft.

Thanks for reading and hope you enjoy the comics!