Useful. As practitioners, we can’t be content to paint within the lines drawn by managers. We must have the courage and creativity to ask whether our products and systems are useful, and to apply our deep knowledge of craft and medium to define innovative solutions that are more useful.

                Usable. Ease of use remains vital, and yet the interface-centered methods and perspectives of human-computer interaction do not address all dimensions of web design. In short, usability is necessary but not sufficient.

                Desirable. Our quest for efficiency must be tempered by an appreciation for the power and value of image, identity, brand, and other elements of emotional design.

                Findable. We must strive to design navigable web sites and locatable objects, so users can find what they need.

                Accessible. Just as our buildings have elevators and ramps, our web sites should be accessible to people with disabilities (more than 10% of the population). Today, it’s good business and the ethical thing to do. Eventually, it will become the law.

                Credible. Thanks to the Web Credibility Project, we’re beginning to understand the design elements that influence whether users trust and believe what we tell them.

                Valuable. Our sites must deliver value to our sponsors. For non-profits, the user experience must advance the mission. With for-profits, it must contribute to the bottom line and improve customer satisfaction

See more articles on Peter’s Web site Semantic Studio

    ”Two important aspects of the overall consumer satisfaction are: (i) the level of satisfaction associated with the final chosen product (e.g., Day, 1984; Spreng et al., 1996), and (ii) the level of satisfaction associated with the purchasing process (e.g., Arnould and Price, 1993; Oliver, 1993). The former has been referred to as the product satisfaction and the latter has been referred to as the process satisfaction. The product satisfaction can be measured in two aspects: (i) a holistic satisfaction towards a chosen product (Spreng et al., 1996) and (ii) the specific levels of satisfaction towards the product attributes (Oliver, 1993). A typical means to evaluate product satisfaction is to measure rated consumers’ affective responses to the selected products (Cole and Balasubramanian, 1993; Westbrook, 1987; Mano and Oliver, 1993; Westbrook and Oliver, 1991)”.

• Environment
• Colors moods
• Audio feedback
• Visual feedback
• Trust
• Branding
• Usefulness
• Practicality
• Emotional effect

• How do Users Think – Listen to customers and define priorities in regard to effective use.
• Don’t Make A User Think – It should be simple, obvious and totally self-explanatory.
• Ease Of Use – How fast can a user who has never seen the user interface before learn it well enough to accomplish the basics of what they need to do?
• Efficiency of Use – Once an experienced user has learned to use the system, how easily and quickly, can tasks be accomplished?
• Memorability – If a user has used the system before, can they remember enough to use it without difficulty the next time or does the learning curve have to begin again.

“Showing personality in your app, website, or brand can be a very powerful way for your audience to identify and empathize with you. People want to connect with real people and too often we forget that businesses are just collections of people. So why not let that shine through?” – Aaron Irizarry

“Deeply understanding their customers is what allows successful companies to think five years ahead of the market and develop products and services that revolutionize the way we live our lives… By understanding the market and the needs of their customers, these companies can develop products customers want and put themselves in the best position to achieve success.” – Demetrius Madrigal

Design is really about the way products and services come to life. The companies that build the most enduring relationships with customers often do so by creating an environment where design flourishes. They have leadership that embraces design, executives who trust their gut and their employees as much as they trust all the data they receive abut their business. To really grasp design is to intuit what customers want, often before customers even know what they want it. That’s not something you can learn in a focus group or an online survey.” – Jay Greene

The main themes Peter talked about were:

-Documentation and technical products co-evolve.

-Good decisions avoid protracted difficulties

-Experienced writers are positioned to inform cross-product engineerizng teams

The solutions Peter put forth were:

-Encourage generic naming conventions, not based on company or product names.

-Use common storage locations and procedures for same things:  installation paths and configuration mechanisms.

-Force engineering teams to identify audiences and use-cases for every new feature.  Organize docs along those lines.

-One style, one template, one production system.

As Peter took the audience through the history of the speech recognition products he had worked on for over 13 years, it became clear that many choices had to be made at each juncture, keeping, discarding and finally coming down to the most critical information. The result is increased usability and intuitiveness.

Nuance follows the Agile development model and there was a lively discussion on how many engineers can be on a team (ranged from 12 to over 40!) and how writing groups synchronize with engineering teams to complete work for sprint deadlines.  Better managed teams stop adding new engineering features about mid-way through each sprint so the doc and QA teams can finish their deliveries by the final date.

Thanks to Nuance for letting us use their facility for this informative Coffee.

Stay tuned for more events via our Web page.   www.clearpnt.com

Wikipedia defines agile software development as a group of software development methodologies based on iterative and incremental development, where requirements and solutions evolve through collaboration between self-organizing, cross-functional teams.

The teams hold daily stand-up meetings run by a scrum master, or project manager, who keeps everyone on task. The product owner represents the stakeholders and the business and maintains the product backlog. The sprint is a specific time span during which all team members are focused on the same goal, such as building a part of the product.

Lynne described the techniques she has learned for supporting 38 engineers and 3 major teams at Courion. Her guidelines for writers include:

• Proactively communicate documentation needs and requirements to your manager and all the scrum masters
• Educate team members about documentation tasks
• Include all tasks related to documentation in the sprint planning sessions
• Be flexible about agile processes and practices

The discussion revealed a wide range of experiences with agile development. The audience agreed that a technical writer’s success has a lot has to do with the attitude of engineering management and the scrum masters. In companies where the technical writer is included from the start of each project, outcomes were positive. But some companies unfortunately still view  documentation as an end-of-process task and marginalize their writers by not including them in stand-ups and planning meetings.

Clearly agile development demands that writers participate proactively, speaking up freely in meetings keeping the team informed daily about documentation status. This immediate participation offers the opportunity to bring up blockages and have the scrum master intervene on the spot to keep the process moving forward.

The group also noted that topic-based writing is a good practice for documentation in an agile development group. If you’re interested in more detail, see the Clear Point events calendar for the webinars we offer on the subject. And check the calendar for upcoming Coffee topics as well.

Thanks again to Courion for their conference room and the coffee!

Sole Writer in Agile Slides

Topic-Based Authoring? Structured Authoring?

• Topic-based authoring – not sure what it is or why to use it?

• Structured authoring – not sure what it is or why to use it? Whether you need DITA or structured Frame?

Topic-based and structured authoring arose out of technical communication’s changing needs in an age of online help, mobile apps, user-generated content, and new tools and technologies. They can be confusing. This tool-agnostic session will help clarify topic-based and structured authoring – what they are, whether you need them, and how to apply them without turning your company upside down. In a nutshell…

Topic-based authoring creates content in small, stand-alone chunks rather than books. Structured authoring creates content with a formal structure. They’re separate processes but are most useful together. The chunks provide flexibility needed for single sourcing and multi-channel publishing; the structure adds consistency that helps authors create the content, helps users understand it, and helps “future-proof” it in general.

How does this benefit technical communicators?

• Simplified maintenance and fewer errors and inconsistencies.

• Supports company strategy, increasing technical communicators’ value.

Sounds good. But implementation can also waste time and disrupt operations if the effort doesn’t fit your company’s strategic and operational context.

In this 3 ½ hour session you will learn:

• Definitions of topic-based and structured authoring.

• Business context – support for company strategy, organizational behavior, dealing with legacy material, and other business issues that determine whether topic-based and structured authoring become internalized or just another flash fad.

• Technical context – trends in technologies and tools and how they’ll affect your content development, maintenance, and distribution.

• Implementation issues – information type definition, template creation, cascading style sheets, and other implementation specifics.

At the end of this Webinar, you’ll have the conceptual background needed to decide whether topic-based and structured authoring is for you, to start evaluating your own material, and to begin the transition.

Register for this Webinar

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Attendees at our Clear Point Coffee on June 10 viewed a compelling slide show on the new direction for documentation managers. Doug Gibson, Senior Manager of the User Interface Design team at Symantec, had both good news and bad news to report, but our audience was already well aware of the biggest challenge – the need to rethink documentation in light of its shrinking audience share.

The old complaint ”No one ever reads the documentation” is now closer to the truth than ever. But the good news is that we can help rebuild our audience and refortify our team by focusing on our basic goals. Technical documentation departments and user experience departments are both charged with sharing information with customers to help them use products and services most effectively. Given this joint mission, the separation of these two functions is an anachronism.

First Doug looked at where users go for that information these days. Using a 2009 survey of over 700 customers he prepared this list of sources, in order of highest frequency of use:

1. Google
2. Knowledge base
3. Company site
4. Online help
5. Printed documentation

Workers across the board have less time and more responsibility in today’s economy than they did even five years ago. And since people today read less in general, and the Internet is fast, thorough, and almost universally available, piles of paper documentation are clearly outmoded. Plus we face a growing legacy of unhappy history with online help, especially among novice and intermediate users. In short, documentation professionals must recognize that the customer has moved their cheese. Writers need to be part of a new solution, helping to ensure that answers to product questions come up easily on Google and that the user interface is intuitive and helpful. Collaborating with user experience professionals will unify content and design – and ultimately deliver more value to the company.

At Symantec Doug found that inviting both groups to lunch generated a productive collaboration. Looking at specific issues with a particularly troublesome product, a cross-functional team created joint solutions and strategized on how to get buy-in from other company stakeholders. Their efforts eventually saved Symantec $1 million a month in support costs.

Conclusion:  the times they are a-changin’. The solution starts with reaffirming our intent – to help users get what they need to be productive. This may mean reinventing documentation jobs, so that you work even more closely with your customers and UX colleagues. It means paying attention to content in a different way, with more emphasis on crafting it in a form that works with online databases and search engines. Opportunity knocks, and documentation professionals can answer, improving their own skill sets and the reputation of their company.

Dougs slides

We have a client that has priority deliverables within the next 1 to 6 months.  Work is mostly on site in Boston.  Rate will depend on experience and specific job.  Feel free to pass this on.

Contact:  Marlene Favaloro

Marlene@clearpnt.com

Contract 1:

Instructional Designer/Course Developer needed for large high tech company in Boston for two project deliverables. ID will work closely with SME’s/developers to create elearning training for technical audiences. The ID will take content and review and revise it for instructional integrity and prepare it for final production, usually in a blended elearning format.  Must have strong HTML/Flash development skills as well as be familiar with Articulate and ability to create scripts for WebEx delivery. Must have experience integrating courseware with an LMS.  This a 40 hour per week engagement for approximately 3 months to interview and begin immediately.

Contract 2:

Prestigious software company in Boston is hiring several Instructional Designers for six months to work closely with the learning solutions group to redesign and develop curriculum for a dynamic new hire sales training program. These professionals will be responsible for building elearning and ILT modules as well as webinars, podcasts and coaching and ILT guides.  It’s a great opportunity to part of major learning initiative in a fast paced environment, producing blended elearning and ILT training.

IDs must have excellent project management and multitasking skills, strong writing and editing skills, be collaborative and work well within a team, and have some elearning tool experience. Qualified candidates must have 5+ years of strong instructional design experience and advanced PPT skills. Knowledge of Lectora is a plus! Knowledge of MS Office and PowerPoint required. Other tools experience/exposure a plus – i.e. Captivate, Flash (animations) and Articulate. This is a 40 hour per week engagement. Interviews to start immediately and work to begin mid June!