Sarah O’Keefe, Ellis Pratt of Cherryleaf, and Tony Self of Hyperwrite
Find out where these three presenters see the industry going. This event is for managers with tech comm responsibility, with or without prior technical writing experience.
There’s been a ton of discussion about the various organizations, especially STC, recently. With established associations, it can be difficult to take a completely fresh look because of the constraints of structure, organization, and tradition.
So, I thought I’d ask this question: What does your ideal association for technical communicators look like?
In a post entitled, “Dueling Pianos: Do We Need STC?”, Kristi Leach writes this:
And maybe it’s time to start thinking about funding more regional conferences with lighter footprints rather than one, large conference. (Release Notes blog)
Lots of great discussion in that post and in the comments.
[I am working on a white paper version of the presentation I just gave at the STC Summit in Dallas. This is an excerpt. If you didn’t get a chance to see the session, I’m doing it as a webcast in mid-June (event details) and also (presumably updated) at the tekom conference in November.]
In early 2009, Scriptorium Publishing conducted a survey to measure how and why technical communicators are adopting structured authoring.
My presentation for the STC Summit in Dallas is finally done. The session, “Managing in an XML environment,” is scheduled for Tuesday, May 4, at 4 p.m. Central time.
I hope to see you in Dallas, but if you can’t make the conference in person, I will also do a webcast version of this presentation on June 15 at 1 p.m. Eastern time. That event is free but does require registration.
I’m sure you’re wondering about the duck. In my presentation, I will be introducing a formula for measuring documentation quality. It’s based on Quality, Usability, and some other factors that spell out, you guessed it, QUACK.
And if that’s not enough to bring you to the session, I also have several other animals in my slides. Consider yourself warned.
In choral music, “blend” refers to bringing together a diverse group of voices into a pleasing sound in which no single voice is dominant. As technical communication moves into a more collaborative approach to content, it occurs to me that both writers and musicians need to blend. Here are some choral archetypes and their writerly equivalents:
Our challenge, as writers, is that we have been accustomed to working solo, and now we must learn to blend our authorial voice into the larger group. The skills that make great soloists are not the same skills that make great contributors.
Michael Hughes, IBM ISS Security Systems
Yay, I finally get into a session.
Wireframes can be high fidelity (rendered dialog box that looks like the real thing) or low fidelity (sketch on a bar napkin). Fidelity actually has several components: appearance, medium, and interactivity.
Low fidelity appearance is something that looks (or is) hand drawn. High fidelity looks like a finished UI. Low fidelity appearance can be advantageous because people don’t get distracted.
Low fidelity medium is paper; high fidelity medium is an actual user interface.
Low fidelity interactivity is static—a picture of the thing. Then, you have scripted interactivity, where you take people through a scripted, controlled sequence. Next is intervention…the user says what they would do and then the UX designer shows them the next result. This can be done with paper prototypes. Finally, you have functional interactivity, where the various UI components actually work.
Low fidelity advantages: Quick, easier, and cheaper to create and modify. More importantly, people are more willing to give feedback on something that looks finished. People are afraid to give feedback on something that looks polished because they don’t want to hurt your feelings, but if you provide a low-fidelity wireframe, you will get much more candid feedback.
Low fidelity disadvantages: You might get detailed feedback on irrelevant details (“this button should be square and not rectangular”). Limited ability to watch users interact. Some users cannot visualize the final product from a low-fidelity version.
High fidelity advantages: The prototype is more realistic. Easier to understand and less room for misinterpretations. You can watch the users interact with the design.
Low fidelity disadvantages: More expensive to create, less encouraging of feedback, people focus on minutiae, easy for designers to become emotionally involved.
(“You might throw in lorem ipsum text and then have people correct your Latin.”)
As you move farther into development, fidelity generally needs to increase.
Higher fidelity is important when you have higher usability risks due to lots of interactivity, complex UI, new interactions and content (for dev team or users), where in user task flow does UI occur (earlier is riskier).
Bar napkins: Good for early conceptual designs, not so good for felt tip pens and putting a wet beer glass on.
Paper prototypes: Can create the various interfaces and do some paper-based flow testing. Not so good for a sense of scale or for assessing content.
PowerPoint: Can do hyperlinks and action buttons. Create each interface on a slide and then link them with PP features. Use slide sorter and rearrange to simulate various user workflows. For web design, put a browser window on the slide master to force you to stay in the browser space. Good for sense of physical navigation, planning layout, producing paper output, presenting look and feel for interactive web pages. Not so good for complex interactions and for look and feel of applications.
Visio: Pretty good set of widgets for making realistic-looking dialog boxes. Similar pluses and minuses as PowerPoint, but also good for look and feel of applications. Can use to incorporate wireframes with flowcharts, use case diagrams, and other macro-design tools.
Balsamiq Mockup: Presenter’s favorite tool (mine, too). Extended demo. If you’re interested, try it online for free. Realistic enough to help designer imagine what the user experience will be.
Pencil (Firefox plug-in): “they have the world’s worst online help”
Axure demo: Can build tooltips. Higher fidelity than Balsamiq. Lets you take note and annotate the fields and then print as a Word file. Use to lay out business rules, alternate text, and more. Suitable for Web 2.0 interactions, which are difficult or impossible in Visio.
Bear with me in a post that’s going to be even less coherent than usual. (And that’s on the heels of the Great Graphic Debacle.)
Is access to information a right or a privilege?
In democracies, we believe that citizens have a right to their government’s information.
U.S. citizens are likely familiar with the Freedom of Information Act (FoIA) and the various sunshine and open meeting laws. In 2005, India passed a Right to Information Act, which “requires every public authority to computerise their records for wide dissemination and to proactively publish certain categories of information so that the citizens need minimum recourse to request for information formally.” Other countries have similar legislation; the Right2Info organization “brings together information on the constitutional and legal framework for the right of access to information as well case law from more than 80 countries, organized and analyzed by topic.”
In the absence of a compelling government interest (the FoIA has nine, which include national security and personnel privacy issues), governmental information should be available to citizens. (This does assume, of course, that we are talking about governments who acknowledge that they are accountable to their citizens.)
If governments have an obligation to make information accessible to their citizens, does that equate to a right to the information? What about equal access to information? Is that a right?
For example, if certain public information information is readily available only on the Internet, does it follow that a citizen has a general right to Internet access? This question was actually considered by the European Union parliament last year, in the context of a new French law that cuts off Internet access to repeat offenders who infringe on copyrights with file-sharing:
Opponents of the legislation have responded by suggesting that Internet access is fundamental to liberty, an argument that suffered a setback on Wednesday as the European Parliament voted against codifying Internet access as a basic human right. (Is Internet Access a Fundamental Right?, CNet.com, May 6, 2009)
There are also interesting developments in financial information. The U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) requires publicly traded companies to make certain information available to the public. This information is delivered through the EDGAR (Electronic Data Gathering, Analysis, and Retrieval) system.
Currently, the official submission format for EDGAR data is plain text or HTML, but the SEC is phasing in the use of an XML vocabulary called XBRL (Extensible Business Reporting Language).
“The purpose of the XBRL mandate is to make corporate financial information more easily available to stockholder.” (The XBRL mandate is here: Is IT ready?, Ephraim Schwarz, InfoWorld, November 25, 2008)
So in addition to mandating disclosure of corporate financial information, the SEC is now mandating easier access to the disclosed information. (A simple implication of XBRL is that you could more easily find executive compensation numbers.)
But what about non-governmental, non-regulated information? Is there a right to access? The business model of analyst firms (Gartner Group), business research companies (Dun & Bradstreet, Hoover’s), and, for that matter, the entire publishing industry (!!) says no. If you want information, you pay.
But look at the evolution of government philosophies and with that, content disclosure requirements. A king who reigns by divine right discloses what he wants to. A democratically elected leader must justify a lack of disclosure. It seems clear that we have shifted to the idea that access to government information is a right.
Will commercial information evolve in the same direction? There are actually some developments that point toward information as a right. In particular, the idea that information must be accessible—that information presentation should not exclude those with visual impairments or other disabilities—begins to build a foundation for equal access to information as a right.
What do you think? Will the right to information access be considered a bedrock principle in 50 or 100 years?
[Update, March 5: corrected the graphic. It now shows that increased expertise does not produce increased value on the limited curve and does produce increased value on the unlimited curve.]
It’s the third rail of technical writing debates: writing ability or technical expertise? And this week, I ran across two articles that argue that good writing is the key to successful technical writing.
I agree that good writing is important. It’s just that I think that domain expertise and tools expertise are also important. To succeed as a technical communicator, you need all three of these qualifications. (A healthy sense of skepticism about any information that you are given is also helpful. Trust, but verify.)
Here, we have Sandhya, the outgoing President of STC’s India chapter:
If I’ve managed to make a minor dent in a paradigm shift away from the importance of tools and years of experience to the importance of basic technical communication and leadership skills, I’d be thrilled. (Sandhya, 7 Habits of Highly Effective Technical Communicators, INDUS)
These skills are not mutually exclusive, and technical writers need all of them. An excellent writer with more experience is better than an excellent writer with less experience. An average writer with great tools knowledge is better than an average writer with average tools knowledge.
That said, I think there’s a point of diminishing returns.
Diminishing returns for extra tools knowledge
The value curve for writing ability follows the “unlimited” line. But the value curve for tools expertise is different. Once a writer exceeds the baseline required tools knowledge, there’s not much additional value in additional tools expertise. That’s the limited curve. (The curve for domain expertise depends on the topic, I think. If you write about consumer software, you’re probably on the limited curve. If you write about highly specialized topics (biochemistry, semiconductors, nuclear medicine), domain expertise is probably on the unlimited curve.
Here is another perspective from Ramana Murthy:
A good product documentation is one that helps users achieve their goals easily, irrespective of the tool it has been authored with – be it RoboHelp, Author-it or the unglamorous Microsoft Word. Product documentation does not arrive with a label like “Developed with the best documentation tools”; nor are there instances of customers preferring product documentation authored with a particular tool. (Ramana Murthy, Technical Communication: Content is the key, tcworld)
True , but it’s also irrelevant. The corporation who is paying for content to be created may care a great deal if option A allows you to create content better, faster, or (especially) cheaper than option B.
The tools and technologies you choose for your content-creation efforts matter because they affect the quality and the development cost of your final deliverables. And therefore, in addition to writing ability, technical communicators must master the required tools, technologies, and templates at the appropriate level.
