Our team taught and learned so much during TechLearn 2023. Here are some insights from our test kitchen demonstration, the L&D healthcare series, and more!
(Warning: Images of delicious New Orleans food will make you envious.)
Conference season is coming up! Our team is ready to connect with you at a variety of in-person and online events.
From May to September, here’s where you can connect with the Scriptorium team.
If you didn’t see our team in action at ConVEx this year, here are the highlights from our sessions.
Last week’s LavaCon conference in Portland, OR was the highest attended ever. And with good reason; the program was very compelling. Regardless of session focuses (web copy, chatbots, virtual reality, and more), nearly every session echoed the same themes: change is constant, collaboration is critical, find your tribe.
Two weeks ago, The LavaCon Conference made its return to Dublin, Ireland. Before I dive in, thanks to Jack Molisani for yet another fun and insightful LavaCon conference!
Positive, optimistic, energetic. Once again, the tcworld India conference in Bangalore did not disappoint.
The tcworld China event took place in Shanghai April 18 and 19. I was there to present on content strategy and advanced DITA (yes, I hear your gasp of surprise), but for me, the most interesting part of the trip was getting a chance to connect with the technical communication community in China.
This year’s tekom/tcworld conference reinforced the ongoing doctrinal chasm between North American technical communication and German technical communication.
I am speaking, of course, of the proper role of DITA in technical communication. If any.
We’re about to begin the last quarter of 2015, and that means CONFERENCES. Scriptorium is attending many tech comm and content strategy events.
Will we see you at these conferences?
This post is a recap of the presentation I delivered at Localization World Berlin on June 4, 2015. It describes how and why to adapt a content strategy in support of The Internet of Things. The presentation slides are available on SlideShare.
What is the content strategy of things? To simplify definitions, content strategy is the planning for and governance of the content lifecycle, and the Internet of Things is the connecting of devices and software to provide greater value. To adapt content strategy to the Internet of Things, the content strategy of things can be defined as the planning for and governance of connected content to provide greater value.
BIG.
That’s my first impression of the tcworld conference, from which I just returned. I’m still jet-lagged from my trip, but I wanted to briefly share my experiences with those—especially from the US—who are considering attending in the future.
Whew! I’m just back from the excellent LavaCon event in Portland. I have (mostly) recovered from that trip, so now I’m focusing on the upcoming tcworld conference in Wiesbaden, Germany. And I need your help!
When I was a high school student in Boulder, Colorado, my first job was as a stock boy in an India-imports store. The store, Hamara Dukan, stocked all sorts of handicrafts and objets d’art from India including clothing, wood carvings, brass bowls and knickknacks, hand-printed bedspreads, incense, Kashmiri boxes, and thousands of other items. After working there for a couple of years, I acquired an appreciation of the things the country produced, but was always curious about the people and what it was like to be in India.
You know you’ve had a bad travel week when you cannot wait to compose the complaint letter to the airline. But sandwiched between flight problems, I had a great time in Wiesbaden at tekom/tcworld 2011.
The slides from my tekom/tcworld session on the economics of information are below.
The tekom conference is in full swing. My presentation slides are below.
I delivered this presentation on October 2 at Lavacon 2010 in San Diego. Many thanks to the noble souls who showed up at 8 a.m. (!) on a beautiful Saturday (!!) morning.
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.
Simon Bate and I will be attending WritersUA this year.
I will be mainly camped in Scriptorium’s exhibit booth. Hours for that are Monday 8:00 am – 6:00 pm and Tuesday 8:00 am – 5:30 pm. Please stop by when you get a chance. Simon will be joining me, but is also presenting on XSL Techniques for XML-to-XML Transformations on Monday at 3:25. Here’s a bit of the description:
In a recent project, we used XSL to correct markup and fix conversion errors in 55,000 XML files containing 2000-year-old Greek texts. The clean-up work included correcting errors in the Greek numbering system, converting text-based markup to XML, replacing or repairing missing markup, and ensuring the accuracy of our work in such a large document set. This session uses this work to illustrate how XML-to-XML transforms differ from XML-to-output transforms. Along the way we describe some XSL techniques we created for processing XML data in which there is a close relationship between the content and the markup.
This year, we’re bringing swag in the form of free copies of The Compass, a printed compilation of Scriptorium white papers. For WritersUA, we have two new white papers, and the book is now almost 200 pages long. (Our white papers are also available, for free, in HTML and PDF format.)
If that’s not a sufficiently sweet enticement, you can also expect local chocolates. The leading contender is currently Fran’s, but I’m open to suggestions, especially from Seattle locals. (We generally pick up chocolate once we arrive rather than attempting to ship it. Ask me some about the Great Truffle Shipping Debacle.)
Simon and I are both scheduling private meetings during the event. If you are a current or prospective client of ours, or if you just want to talk, let us know and we’ll set something up.
The information you can get from a conference presentation is usually available online—in blogs, webcasts, forums, and/or white papers. So why should you invest the time and the money to attend an event in person? In the end, there’s something very powerful about eating and drinking with a group of people. (And no, alcohol is not required, although it doesn’t hurt. Until the next day, when it hurts a lot.)
The value of conferences, which is not (yet) replicated online is in the “hallway track”—the discussions that happen between the formal sessions:
“[B]eing able to establish a one-to-one personal connection with other professionals in your field is critical to being a success.” (Dave Taylor in The Critical Business Value of Attending Conferences)
“I’ve found that time and again, I’ll hear speakers or audience members or participate in conversations and lie awake that night jam-packed with new ideas (some that don’t even correspond remotely to the concepts discussed that day). Conferences are a brainstorming paradise and a terrific opportunity for new ideas to come bubbling to the surface.” (Rand Fishkin, The Secret Value of Attending Conferences)
Scriptorium has quite a few social media “features”:
But there’s something missing. I’ve attended and presented quite a few webcasts, and I can tell you that it’s actually far more difficult to deliver a compelling webcast than a compelling conference presentation. As the presenter, you lose the ability to gauge your audience’s body language. As an attendee, you have the temptation of your email and other distractions. The audio coming through your computer or phone is somehow not real—it’s easy to forget that there’s an actual person on the other end giving the presentation online. (There’s also the problem that many webcasts are sales pitches rather than useful presentations, but let’s leave that for another time.)
In my experience, it’s much easier to sustain online friendships with people that I have met in real life. Even a brief meeting at a conference means that I will remember a person as “that red-haired woman with the funky scarf” rather than as an email ID or Twitter handle. So, I think it’s important to go to conferences, meet lots of people, and then sustain those new professional relationships via social media.
In other words, conferences and social media complement each other. Over time, I think we’ll see them merge until a new interaction model. For example, we are already seeing Twitter as a real-time feedback engine at conference events. (Here’s an excellent discussion of how presenters should handle this.) Joe Welinske’s WritersUA is experimenting with a community site tied to the conference.
What are your thoughts? How important are conferences to your career?
In addition to our November event on localization, we are adding another webcast in December. I’ll be presenting Strategies for coping with user-generated content on December 8 at 11 a.m. Eastern time via GoToWebinar. This event is free but registration is required.
Here’s the description:
The rise of Web 2.0 technology provides a platform for user-generated content. Publishing is no longer restricted to a few technical writers—any user can now contribute information. But the information coming from users tends to be highly specific.
The two types of information can coexist and improve the overall user experience. User-generated content also offers an opportunity for technical writers to participate as “curators”—by evaluating and organizing the information provided by end users.
Remember, there’s no charge to attend, but you do need to register.
Date: December 8, 2009
Time: 11 a.m. Eastern
Topic: Strategies for coping with user-generated content
Registration: https://www2.gotomeeting.com/register/583647346
PS Depending on the response to this event, we are going to consider additional free events.
