Usage Stages of a Web App

Posted on June 24, 2011 by Bill

Overview
Lately I have been thinking about web applications (web apps) and the importance of the user experience. I have been thinking about if it is at all possible to simplify and standardize how we talk about that user experience.
So if we look at web apps and we look for common patterns of the actions that users perform, could we generalize about them. Could we say that all web apps have these steps that users go through?
What if web apps, maybe all apps when you think about it, had a general set of stages or phases in terms of user interaction or user experience? What if we could come up with a standard set of those usage stages and develop a standard vocabulary? If so, here’s my best shot at it.

Usage Stages
In terms of user interaction, all web apps have these stages, expressed as verbs from the user’s point of view:

  1. search / shop / find an item or an action
  2. compare / edit or, if not available, create or combine the item or action
  3. act / buy / run the item or action
  4. handle results / receipt / download / report or otherwise work with data that is the result of the previous stage(s)

When I shared this idea with Rick he said that this is like the CRUD (create – rewrite – update – delete) of database operations… but for the user experience of web apps. But I don’t have a good acronym. Maybe SCAR or SCAD?

Direction
Would that buy us anything if we could all agree on a set of stages?
Would that allow us to establish conventions for all web apps?
Would this work for mobile apps?
Could we then adopt conventions for navigation and performing these stages?
It’s something to think about. I’m open to suggestions about this.
Has anyone already tried this or done this?

Posted in Information Architecture, User Experience, User Scenarios, Web Applications | Tagged , | Comments Off

The Force of Salesforce

Posted on June 17, 2011 by Bill

We have a great local Salesforce user group, the Raleigh Salesforce.com User Group. Thanks to Deborah, Amber, Karen, Kelly and the rest for making it work! We had a great meeting today.
Raleigh Salesforce User Group Meeting June 2011
Each time I go, there are more people attending, the presentations get better, and the food is more fun. The Asian lunch was catered by Pei Wei. Great food! I think the fortune in my fortune cookie was right on!

Steve B. from Salesforce opened with the typical ideological pitch. It was great summary of how to deal with the “digital divide” (between the employees who are going social/mobile and the enterprise infrastructure which is not quite there). He gave broad brush strokes about how to listen on the public social network, create your own private network, and create what he was calling a “product social network”. You can’t argue with success.

Then several local users shared their stories about their experiences with Chatter. Greg M. from RedHat gave a great summary of how to prepare, deploy, and then encourage adoption of Chatter. I liked his strategy of moving items like email announcements, newsletters, and other communications to Chatter.

Greg Munster with Chatter presentation

Ronda D. with iContact shared how they are using it in Support (not just Sales) and we all enjoyed her telling about their “morale committee” which every Support should have. Great job, Ronda!

Ronda Davis with Chatter for Support

Randy with Siemens shared briefly how they are rolling out Chatter in a very conventional company and the challenges with that. Finally, Jeff P. with Deloitte finished up with a great success story of those in the middle tier of the company finding Chatter as the solution for collaborating about problems and strategizing solutions. He had some suggestions for Salesforce on how to improve Chatter.

Jeff Powrie with Chatter at Deloitte

Thanks to all the presenters – thanks for taking the time to share what worked and what didn’t. This is helpful to the community of users. I think we all like the cloud solution that Salesforce offers but the implementation is in the details, as it were. By sharing best practices (or workable practices), we can all help this still rather young technology find a footing. As I said before, you can’t argue with success. I feel as if we are all building the band wagon as it grows in size and picks up speed!

There was some discussion also about how to integrate instant messaging with Chatter to avoid having to use two separate channels. I am sure we will be seeing some solutions for that. I was surprised how quickly the time had passed. The meeting broke with an invitation to attend Dreamforce 2011 and several people hung around with questions and mini-meetings.

Thanks to Red Hat at Centennial Campus for hosting the meeting – you have a great venue.
RedHat sign

Posted in cloud solutions, Social Networking, Tools, User Experience, user group meetings, User Scenarios | Tagged , , , , | Comments Off

More Than the Medium

Posted on June 13, 2011 by Bill

I wonder if the reason for the decline of newspaper publishing companies (some say steep decline) is not just that digital technologies are replacing their delivery mechanism. I suspect that it is not because online, specifically web, delivery of content is replacing distribution of hard copy paper medium alone. If there is a problem at the delivery end, it is probably not simply that the paper medium is too limited and too hard to distribute quickly. It is likely due to the challenge of keeping up with the diversity of the fractured audience that wants to receive and perhaps even interact with information coming from a range of sources in their own way and at their own schedule.

Beyond that, I suspect the more daunting problem is actually at the other end of the content lifecycle, at the beginning. It is because the publishing companies can’t keep up with the volume of information available from a number of growing sources. There is so much digital raw data and digital content from a range of sources and no established way other than using the fewer and more expensive individual humans who now have more to look at than they have time to process. There is no way to filter, vet and classify (apologies to the semantic websters among us) the content that can be considered news.

If it were simply a matter of getting information online and charging appropriately for it, there would not be decline and consolidation in the industry. If using social media and mobile technologies were just another delivery channel or publishing platform and not a whole new way of interacting, the industry would continue without interruption. If they had figured out how to handle all the new input, they may have tackled the way to handle all the possible output. But they focused on output only and hence are stuck with an unsustainable business model.

“Governmental policy actions to bolster existing businesses could stall or retard such a shift.” If protecting the existing publishing companies means allowing them to continue doing their content development, delivery, and maintenance as before, then the project will fail. Things have changed, and not just at the delivery end.

Posted in Content Development, content lifecycle, content management, publishing | Tagged , , | Comments Off

Correctness and Coherence on Twitter

Posted on May 26, 2011 by Bill

Background
Michael Harvey (@mtharveyrunner) recently raised the question about whether grammar, spelling, punctuation, and subject-verb agreement in tweets (that is, posts on Twitter) matter. It is not a new topic. We can summarize a few. But when dig a little deeper, there is more than correctness involved. Michael comes to the conclusion himself – it has to do with coherence. My way of saying it is that it matters but it’s a new matter.

Correctness
Should We Care About Grammar and Spelling on Twitter? In this post, Anne Trubek, over a year ago, was more interested in “what they signal about our changing culture”. She said, in conclusion, “We are living in a moment of seismic linguistic change, and attention should be paid—but not to errors.” I would have said “not to errors primarily.”

And some more articles are relevant.
Practical advice from Dr. Sandra Folk joking about Twitter’s Grammar Police, again from last year. “Of course whenever there is a new method of communication inevitably there are attempts to redefine how language and grammar are used.”

My favorite list (from way back in 2007) is From PC to GC, as in Grammatically Correct.

A practical and realistic answer is that you certainly should be allowed to cut some corners if you are limited in the length of your message to 140 characters. It must be acceptable to abbreviate frequently and even leave off articles or other words as long as the meaning can be maintained. If you need permission, here are rules you are allowed to break:
8 Spelling & Grammar Rules You Can Break on Twitter

And the flip side is that if you only have 140 characters of type, then you better get every character right. With so little amount of space in each packet, each one becomes valuable. Even hyperlinks are abbreviated. Special characters are either defined (RT for retweet) or informally accepted as conventions (FF for follow Friday). And the hash tag (#) and its affect when prefixed to other letters and words has unique meaning. More about that in a bit.

I tried to explain that Twitter is one channel of communication, one type of social technology, but it is used by so many people for such a wide variety of conversations. It is used for talk among friends (in which spelling doesn’t matter) to news reporting (in which spelling can very well matter) and everything in between. So there might not be a single answer. For some people and their communication on Twitter, it matters. For others, it might not. Who are we to judge the correctness of all of communication?

Coherence
My immediate response to Michael’s question (if all those rules matter) was, do YOU care about it? Do they matter to you? His response to an early draft of this blog was the following:
Michael Harvey tweet
He said, “I care about grammar/spelling/etc in so far as they contribute to the coherence of the message – I can do without noise.” Well, that’s roughly what he said – I wrote out the word without and put a period at the end of the sentence, assuming it was a sentence. I wholeheartedly agree and I hope he realizes he has answered his own question. Maybe those only matter if they further the coherence of the message being sent.

So maybe after we have addressed the obvious questions, we can move on to the more subtle issues. Along these lines, and in a more Twitter centric vein, Shea Bennett, again over a year ago, raised this question:
Lessons In Twitter Etiquette – Is It Okay To Remove Typos And Spelling Errors From Retweets?. Now we are getting into some interesting editorial terrain.

You see the hash tag (#) that I mentioned earlier doesn’t just introduce another quirky mechanism for users of Twitter. It also starts to make the entire social use of Twitter more interesting. Now there is value beyond individual tweets as individual communications between individuals. Now there is value for me when I search groups of tweets and begin to see patterns or larger scale features in the information sea. A retweeted message would just be redundant if you were looking at Twitter as individual messages, but as a retweet gains momentum (or weight in a search engine), it’s social significance grows.

So here is another question for Michael. Is the coherence that you talk about only an aspect of a single tweet’s message or the “message” of the larger scale group of tweets that is available across the social dimension of Twitter. Something to think about.

Posted in Blog, language | Tagged , , , , , , | 1 Comment

A Day in the Life of an Information Team

Posted on May 25, 2011 by Bill

The webinar program, An Evening with National Public Radio (NPR), hosted by the Potomac Valley Chapter of ASIS&T, touched on a few of the interesting challenges of information lifecycle management of an innovative media organization that produces and airs shows daily, seven days a week. Mary Glendinning, reference librarian and Hannah Sommers, a broadcast librarian, both with NPR, gave a friendly and informative talk about their work. While NPR’s mission is broadly “to create a more informed public”, the speakers shared their department’s narrower mission “to connect NPR staff with trustworthy information, and to implement best practices in content lifecycle management”. I would have loved to ask what their sources are for best practices. Their work requires them to wear many hats and they were quick to point that out – with a reference to the “Caps for Sale” guy and a list of their titles, which was summarized in this graphic.

Susan Stamberg referred to a librarian on their team as NPR’s “Secret Weapon” and they have taken that title with pride as one of their many hats.

What I find fascinating about their work is the timeliness of the content – the programming is fresh, compiled daily and so breaking news and prepared stories come together in the few hours before the show is aired. It is a perfect environment for Agile and Scrum, and they told us that this is one approach that is proving successful in their work. I learned phrases such as the “show rundown” which is the schedule they produce that summarizes (a rundown) of what will likely air on the upcoming show and “next show up” where the programming content either finds a home or does not. We were shown a show rundown for an upcoming All Things Considered program.

It certainly sounds like a lively and dynamic environment, so it is a curious juxtaposition of timely content, which is used so quickly (finding a show or dying) and archival content, which I associate with a more static and almost timeless storage. Information is produced, pitched, and aired so quickly, seemingly at the spur of the moment, and then archived for upcoming shows if not posterity. The accuracy and retrievability of the metadata of their content must be critically important. They gave one example of their metadata, for an obituary of a famous person who recently died and how it was used in a program, and went from there to talk in general about their work at reducing their Subject taxonomy from a size of 3000 down to something more manageable, perhaps even a dozen main subject categories. Some questions were asked about their ability to maintain consistency of terminology, which you can imagine could be a presentation all to itself.

Overall, the conversation about their work stayed at a high level and touched on very little detail. They used a wonderful metaphor when they said they hoped that their content and taxonomy fit like a hand in a glove. I would love to hear more details about how they do that.

Posted in content lifecycle, content management, Practices | Tagged , , , , , | Comments Off

Surveying Online Surveys

Posted on May 21, 2011 by Bill

This past month I took a few web-based surveys related to technical communication and information architecture. Each was relatively short, taking less than 20 minutes to complete, and each offered some insight into our profession. I don’t know if surveys are talked about much: are they simply data gathering tools for those who give them or are they part of the ongoing conversation we all are having during disruptive and changing times? Here is a sampling of online surveys and how I feel about them. The surveys were:

  • Cherryleaf survey about topics you would pay to read
  • CIDM survey about information delivery
  • Dr. Kules’s survey about information architecture skills
  • ASIS&T’s survey on types of online education programs to offer

Cherryleaf Survey
This survey, from Cherryleaf had only eight questions – the shortest I have taken in a long time – refreshingly short. Shorter than the Wendy’s (as in the restaurant) feedback survey. This one basically boiled down to asking a simple proposition: what trends do you want to know more about and what are you willing to pay for a report on them? The survey offered a fairly insignificant collection of topics as suggestions. In my view, people will pay for content but only if it is presented in depth and is well thought out. And there should be some content that we expect for free, but don’t get me started talking about that. I don’t know if Cherryleaf will get useful results. Overall, I thought this survey was pretty lame in that it didn’t have much to offer the community in terms of results beyond helping Cherryleaf decide what report to publish next. Cherryleaf used surveymonkey.com to host their survey.

CIDM Survey
This survey had just under 20 questions. The Center for Information-Development Management does a good job of providing surveys and publishing results on their web site. As they said, CIDM “regularly surveys members and interested information developers about methods used to deliver information to users.” So this survey was about content delivery. There were so many questions about current forms of delivery that I started thinking about my present employer and how we are publishing content for our customers. Besides posting content on the web, maybe we should make our bigger content containers into books that could be read on mobile devices with ebook readers. More people are getting these cool portable readers and are starting to use them to read all sorts of things, including work related reading. So this survey, while specific to content delivery, had the choice of e-readers so prevalent that I started thinking about using that technology. But is it just more containerizing of information? One of the insights of web-based content delivery is that you can go social with content and let people tag and rate it themselves, even add to it. So it is not just new types of containers – epub instead of hard cover book, web sites and XML instead of indexed and limited-peer-reviewed articles and books. Now we can post content and let others arrange, link, rate and assemble. I don’t know if their survey will catch this technology. CIDM used zoomerang.com to host their survey.

As they have done before, they will provide a report on the results of the survey on the CIDM website. Ones they have done before:

Dr. Kules’s Survey
This IA survey was just over 20 questions with a view of information architecture that was interesting. Dr. Bill Kules at the School of Library and Information Science, The Catholic University of America produced a very practical survey. As he said, “We are conducting a survey regarding job characteristics, skills, and roles of practicing Information Architects to understand how IA professionals view their day-to-day practice of Information Architecture (IA).” No doubt this is a survey that will help all of us understand IA better and help educators understand what is relevant in the field. He used surveymonkey.com to host the survey. While I thought some of the questions were limiting, he was genuinely interested in feedback and provided places for us to type in additional answers. The intent of the survey was clear and I look forward to seeing the results of this one.

ASIS&T Survey
This survey from ASIS&T (the American Society for Information Science and Technology), specifically by the Information Science Education Committee and the Webinar Task Force, had a small number of questions on only three pages. Their goal is determining what types of online education programs to offer. Like Cherryleaf’s survey, this is pretty limited in scope, but I think like Dr. Kules’s survey the results of this survey this could offer some perspective to all of us. It is still going on at Webinar Survey until June 1, and you don’t have to be a member to complete it. Dr. Diane M. Neal, of the Faculty of Information and Media Studies, The University of Western Ontario and June M. Abbas are the co-chairs of that task force. They used a proprietary solution for their survey hosting.

Seeing Results
These surveys were easy to complete and could be done in any widely available browser. Using surveymonkey or zoomerang or any of a number of web-based survey solutions is becoming routine. I have not talked about surveys that are available inside social networking sites. The recent surveys discussed in this blog post were web-based and I learned about them either from other web sites or emails. Call me old-fashioned.

Some of the surveys asked me to describe what I do and gave me buttons that only allowed one choice. Anyone in full-time work knows that we wear many hats and fulfill many roles. Limiting our choices like that is unrealistic though probably easier to handle when it comes to compiling the data. I challenge designers of future surveys to take into account our varied and changing professional titles.

Do online surveys offer something worth commenting on as a blog post would? Do they provide any metadata as a web page would? Could they be considered a litmus test for where we are as a profession? Could one do meta-analysis on surveys or create a tag cloud of words used in a survey to get additional (perhaps unintentional) insights?

But what I wonder about most with these web-based surveys is if we can see the results in something closer to real time. We have all seen “voting” on a web site where you select your choice and immediately you can see the results. That is for one question, but the technology must exist for an entire survey of questions. If you can take the survey now in a matter of minutes, then you should not have to wait for humans to do both a complete analysis of the results and a publishing cycle using conventional media if all you want to see are the compiled results. It just seems like we could take a step forward here by providing a way to at least display the data nearly as quickly as we collect it; eventually, it would be great to see the analysis more quickly, too. Is that too much to expect in this online realm? I challenge developers of future surveys to figure out a way to publish the results more quickly.

Posted in Information Architecture, Online Survey, Practices, Profession, Professional Association | Tagged , , , , , , , , , | Comments Off

How Social Can We Go?

Posted on May 3, 2011 by Bill

Sometimes I am late to the party. For you those of you who are like me in that respect, I offer an introduction to some online social networking groups related to our profession. My apologies to those who for whom this is old news. I have learned about them only recently. (Am I slower than everyone else, or just very busy?) So what are these social networking groups?

Origins
The Association of Technical Communicators was originally SYTC (Society for Young Technical Communicators) and started by Michelle Sander. I am guessing it grew from a (perceived) divide between the “old” guard (that is, STC – the Society for Technical Communication) and younger folks (that is, under-30). It seems to have transformed to avoid those old-new distinctions.

Association of Technical Communicators web site page

TechCommAlliance.com was originally founded by Sarah O’Keefe of Scriptorium, Ellis Pratt of Cherryleaf, and Tony Self of Hyperwrite. Enough said about these heavy-weights in the industry.

TechCommAlliance web site page

Technical Writing World was started by Arnold Burian, I think as a Web2.0-ish place for tech commers. I’ll consider this one the upstart.

Tech Writing World web site page

Impressions
I have joined all three and I’ll look around a bit and see if they have different emphases before I post some content. I have some initial impressions about this group of sites that I would like to share.

First, It is interesting to see their common and overlapping mission statements. It is obvious that all of these can be seen as either direct “competitors” to STC or maybe a better way to say that is that they are filling a (social) need that STC has not yet successfully filled. They definitely are filling the “social networking” void that STC has yet to address.
I mention STC because it claims to be the premier international association for technical communicators.

ATC: The ATC aims to bring technical communicators together. This site will help ATC members communicate, share ideas, inspire each other and hopefully help facilitate friendships around our passion for innovative technical communication.
TCA: This site is intended as a gathering place for professional technical communicators.
TWW This site is an open and free community by technical writers for technical writers.

Second, interestingly enough, so far, I have found the “usual suspects” on all these sites. The same people who are blogging and tweeting are visiting these sites and posting content. While this is on the world-wide web, it seems like a very small community of professionals. You will see many of the same names and faces.

Third, I am not completely sure I see the need for a techcomm-specific network, since I am already on LinkedIn (and member of LinkedIn groups), I follow a bunch of tech writers, UX designers, and information architects on Twitter, and have a Facebook page that I don’t have time to post on, and I follow several blogs with great content. I am wondering if there is a need for yet more sites for sharing information, comparing stories, and generally socializing about professional issues. I am already getting so much information already by tweeting and reading blogs. So I don’t know if we need a “Facebook”-ish site, another online “network”. The forums are nice, but I’m not sure if the excitement will continue.

Fourth, they are all still very young and filling in. TWW looks the most established or filled out. TCA and ATC look as if they have empty spaces and are still trying to figure out how to use all the content management system modules available to them.

Comparison with KeyContent.org
KeyContent.org is a wiki-based web site which offers professionals a place to post content and work collaboratively, but is not a social networking site in the sense that these others are. But it also offers a place online to post articles related to our profession in an open, publicly available place and owned by a non-profit professional association, namely KeyContent.org, Inc. This was started by myself and Rick Sapir and Sherry Steward when, many years ago now, there was no such place online offered by STC or IEEE (Professional Communication Society) or any other professional association. The calendar that KeyContent offers is well-known. What will be the point of these network sites offering a calendar? I guess the idea is that it would all be available in one place. But in a sense, as long as it is on the web, it is available in one place, namely my browser.

Conclusion
The web is still a new place for many people to share ideas, exchange contact information, and generally network in the social sense. Many of us now use social media, if not at work, at least in our volunteer activities or as a way of keeping up with friends and relatives. So networking sites are no longer strange territory. But how social can we go? Should we pick just one platform (Facebook or ATC?), one association (STC or TWW?), one form of content delivery (microblogging, blogging, or forums?). I also wonder to what extent this may add to our body of knowledge as a profession, as some are trying to establish. Will the fragmenting of our profession continue? Right now, I’m optimistic that having all these opportunities for socializing online will make it easier for people to learn about it and find their voice. Time will tell which site or sites will win the minds of the best of our profession. I encourage you to join one or more and connect up with people.

And, finally, I’ll invite my friend and colleague, Rick Sapir, to comment on the super-cool new MySTC Joomla network (as he calls it) that is supposed to be launching soon. Apparently he is on the testing group for that.

Posted in LinkedIn, Profession, Professional Association, Social Networking | Tagged , , , | 3 Comments

Top 10 Disruptions (NOT Trends)

Posted on April 5, 2011 by Bill

The recent technological advances are not “emerging”, and they are not a “tectonic shift”. If we are going to use biological or geological metaphors, then they are “exploding”; they are “an earthquake”; they are disruptive and they are forcing a new way of doing things more rapidly than previous changes. The time to adopt these technologies is getting shorter and shorter. We do not have time to proceduralize or mature our processes before a new disruption occurs. A new technology is adopted, a new economic meltdown obliterates part of the workforce, time to market is becoming measurable in milliseconds not years or months or weeks or days, and our work is revolutionized. This is the world in which I work.

In a prior post (“Disruption is the New Trend”), I wrote about how we are dealing with disruptive technologies, not gradual trends, across our profession and I joked that “Disruption is the new Trend”. Instead of “trends” we should be talking about “disruptions“. And the more I think about it, the more I realize that we talk about these disruptions on the fringes but we don’t face them head on – at least I have not seen these discussed forthrightly on any single site related to our profession. So here goes – here are my Top 10 disruptions. Well, I only have seven right now, but I’m sure another three will come along before we know it.

1. Exponential Adoption of the Web as a Universal Platform
It is truly amazing that in less than a generation we have gone from no computers to lots of computers, and from networked computers to Internet-worked computers and we are not stopping there. I count this one first because we should not just assume it – not take it for granted. Companies and groups and individuals have realized the benefit of connectedness on a scale never before seen. We have adopted the World Wide Web as the universal platform where we can file our taxes, shop, fill out insurance claims, do research, find extended family tree branches, listen to music, post videos, see our bank records, talk with family, and of course, work, whenever we want wherever we are. It is no longer just web sites, but web applications and now, its latest incarnation, the cloud, the realization that we can truly do all this online work completely online free from local limitations. We can store files online, we can talk online, we can run our applications online (not based on our local computer’s hard drive) but using services provided by others who are also online.

Inside enterprises, not open to the rest of the world, the same technology is being adopted for private clouds, intranets, worlds within worlds. Whole municipalities are looking at getting Internet access to their citizens in city-wide hot spots. New devices, even ones in cars, are being developed from the start to have Internet access.

2. Social Media in a Broad Sense
There is nothing emerging about social media. It is taking the web by storm and being adopted so quickly, we are not sure what will happen next. In this category, I also include online collaboration and crowd sourcing, open source projects and social networks, and any place where people are connected with people more intimately online than ever before, allowing people to see each other while they are talking, share data while they are deciding, and allowing grass-roots analytics govern their rating of items. It’s not just that social networks give people a chance to connect with each other and with data; we are also integrating social network applications and allowing subscription models to keep people and data connected in more ways and in more densely connected ways.

3. Mobile Technology
The site of people talking apparently to themselves and buying items from a vending machine with their cell phone are familiar images for us these days. But this is more than just a convenience of a smaller more portable phone. Mobile technology is disruptive because it offers people immediate access to the Web wherever they are, so it means more real-time decision making, more instantaneous exchange of information, more instant access by more people. As access to the universal platform of the web becomes ubiquitous, the points of access will become easier, cheaper, and even more immediate. Mobile technology could just as easily be called Instant technology.

4. Convergence of Previously Disparate Technologies
Closely related to mobile technology is the convergence of previously disparate technologies, each with specialized functions, becoming simply modules of a single device that as yet has no unified and agreed-upon name. Such devices as photo cameras, video cameras, phones, keyboards, movie viewers, book readers, email readers, GPS (or GNSS) devices, personal assistants, and more are all coming together.

5. Advances in Web Display
This one, too, is related to the advances in convergence and shrinking size. Web sites and web apps are deploying more interactivity, using more JavaScript frameworks and AJAX, more desktop functionality, richer graphics and more sophisticated graphical displays than ever before. Devices are providing larger screens with higher resolutions.

6. A Single Global Economy
Thanks to Larry Kunz for this one. He said the “emergence of a single, global economy. Companies can easily send work to other parts of the world with the expectation that the work product will be much cheaper but still good enough to meet objectives. This represents another earthquake for the people who used to do this work and haven’t broadened their skill sets.” Too true. Well, maybe this is a trend since it’s taking a while to come about, but it’s not happening evenly everywhere, so it is partly a trend and partly a disruption.

7. Commoditized Monetized Chopped Up Content
This one may also be a trend. Ten years ago, Dr. Robert Kelton was afraid of modularizing documentation, something he thought was anathema to our work as writers, but we all saw it coming. So this was has had years of gestation but it seems it is happening so quickly now. Chop up your content into topics. Now those topics, even smaller units, much like microblogging posts, are being monetized and being analyzed with metrics. I’m putting analytics and all in this disruption. Search engine optimization based on keywords, an even smaller unit of content, is rampant. Content is a commodity as just another ingredient to a project.

This is only the beginning. The aftershocks have yet to be felt. These are not future trends, these are present disruptions. Let me know what you see. And do it quickly!

Posted in Engineering, Future, Profession, Social Networking, User Experience | Tagged , , | 1 Comment

Content for Community Consumption

Posted on April 5, 2011 by Bill

Today, Peter Grainge posted an article I wrote about RoboHelp on his web site, which is dedicated to RoboHelp tips.

Here it is: Command Line Generation with RoboHelp

When I was searching the Web for information on using the command line to generate the online help in RoboHelp, I came across Peter’s site near the top of the page of Google results. I could have posted the article on my blog or on KeyContent.org, but I thought it made sense to post it where most people would find it. Peter was very gracious to not only post it but take the role of editor – an essential part of any good content development.

I could have given it to the local STC chapter as a contribution to their newsletter, but it comes out only once a month and, again, it wouldn’t be seen by as many people as quickly. When I did a search for “RoboHelp Command Line” there were plenty of posts that list the capability of RoboHelp, but none that explain how to use it. There is a brief treatment on the Adobe support site showing the syntax of the command (see Generate and publish output from the command prompt), but not much beyond that. So I hope my little article takes it a bit further and helps other who are trying to automate the generation of their online help. I don’t claim to have written the final word on the subject. Feel free to send me or Peter additional content.

Let me know if you think this type of consideration – of where to post content – is a useful exercise. Does it make sense for me to consider the context of users, the location of the information that is most similar, etc.? What do you with your content for community consumption?

Posted in Content Development, Information Architecture, Tools | Tagged , , , , | Comments Off

Disruption is the New Trend

Posted on March 29, 2011 by Bill

The webcast on Scriptorium, Trends in Technical Communication, 2011 by Sarah O’Keefe of Scriptorium and Nicky Bleiel of ComponentOne is a great discussion starter. They were all over the place with ideas about what’s happening in the workplace. Here is my response to each of the trends that Sarah and Nicky talked about.

Trend 1: Word is the new black.
I am not sure where Nicky is coming from with this one. Is this a trend at all? To me it is more of a last gasp. Microsoft Word is the last resort. People are retreating to it because it looks like an online tool when really it’s still a document-centric tool. It’s life is limited not because Microsoft is evil but because documents are too bulky and too expensive to make and maintain. Going to Google Docs won’t save the idea of a document. What used to be a holder of content that could be shared for consensus, the document, is loosing out every day to many other holders of content. Wikis, blogs, microblogs, instant messaging and chat are all places where content is finding a home. Agile teams use wiki and instant messaging; not documents and email. And they use them not because software developers are not writers; they use them because agile team members can’t waste time in a Sprint maintaining documents when what is important is the content. If she sees more people using Word it may be because Word is ubiquitous in large organizations, but I would not say its use is a trend. If anything, the trend is away from documents and I have seen this trend. If Word is gaining in usages anywhere, I would suggest other forms on content delivery are gaining even faster.

Trend 2: The Age of Accountability
Is this like the Age of Aquarius? I nice idea, a hopeful idea, but not realistic in business? Using metrics to prove ROI is a good idea. But I’m not sure, apologies to Saul Carliner, that we need to prove our value. Either what we do is of value or it is not. I have worked for organizations where it is obvious. If it is not of value it gets chopped, people lose their jobs, and no more resources are wasted. And also, if it’s separate from other things, then it’s easy to chop off. Instead of trying to justify a doc department or a tech writing team or tech comm as a separate activity, another survival skill would be to become invisible in the organization.

During the discussion of this trend, Nicky seemed to be missing the value of crowd sourcing. Crowd sourcing open source projects is not just a tangent — it might be the direction we are all heading. Don’t minimize the value of crowd sourcing.

Trend 3: SharePoint as a CMS
I would say the trend is to move to collaborative environments. SharePoint is popular because it’s a Microsoft product so it may be in many organizations already, but it is not easy or friendly. There are several aspects of it that are backward or unintuitive. It does scale very well for a repository of documents but it does not have a a lot of social media aspects that are needed in a large collaborative organization. There are other instances of a content management system (CMS) that may be more useful. But definitely the trend is toward more sharing and more collaboration.

Trend 4: Schism in Tech Comm?
There may be a growing gap between authors of traditional documents (or books) and on-liners who are not willing to be limited to documents for the flow of online information. I agree with the one comment that was offered, that it’s not so much a schism (a simple two sides) but a fracturing to a whole bunch of types of technical communicators. The “just writing” group has already declined, the trend has already come and gone. We are already moving to business analysis, knowledge development, information architecture, content strategy. And it is not just that we are turning in one hat for another. We are being asked to wear many hats now. Even though we only have one title on our business card, we typically do several jobs. It is a trend worth talking about. The decline in STC membership isn’t just because STC was becoming ineffective as a professional association, but because industry was laying off lots of technical writers and the profession was changing drastically in ways that have not yet been articulated. I wouldn’t say a schism; I’d say an explosion.

Trend 5: Tri-Pane Help is Here to Stay
Well, here’s another one, like the Microsoft Word trend, where I just have to scratch my head and wonder what Nicky is thinking about. Has she read Tom Johnson’s recent blog about Arguments for and Against Tripane Help? I’m not sure self-contained online help is here to stay at all. The point is not that three-pane is wrong; it’s that it’s self-contained. It DOES come up short because it’s not open to new information coming from multiple sources in multiple media. It’s not even clear that the Web can handle all the new types of information, much less online help. If all she is saying is that three panes are a good architectural way to display online help, then I’ll agree. But if she thinks the future is online help, then I’m afraid I’ll have to disagree.

Trend 6: Cloud-based Tech Comm
Finally, another trend that warrants serious consideration. I would say that the phrase “cloud-based” is as awkward as the word “trend” in this context. It’s not based at all; it’s in the cloud with no base, in a sense. It is out there on the Internet for many to access at any time from anywhere. We are only touching the surface of this one. This is another example of a truly disruptive technology that we have not yet adjusted to.

Totally Missed
“Findability as a trend” – Nicky touched on something worthy of the word “trend” and treated it simply as a footnote! She missed a great opportunity to talk about this. Where the Web is mostly about text content, then searching the text is important. But as the Web moves to Skype and video and applications, there will be less text to search. Whether we assign tags and metadata to other media or whether we give up the metadata and simply realize the real-time communication and decision making of the Web, there may be less importance of searching text in the future. So is findability going to be essential? Of course! But what does findability mean? Let’s keep talking about that one.

Listeners shared these trends that I think are worth mentioning, which the speakers only mentioned in passing:

  • Multimedia (Comics, videos, podcasting and screencasting) — I would even say gaming. This touches on another important aspect of our work — visualization — and there are so many more opportunities when it comes to visualizing (and information architecture).
  • Content for mobile devices; I was shocked by no mention of mobile. But it’s not just mobile devices that you can carry – it’s about mobile meaning immediate!! Modular content is related to this trend because it will be necessary to chop content into smaller pieces to access more quickly and present more quickly. It is a necessary but not sufficient aspect of mobile.
  • Software craftsmanship – I would say this is an important trend that is affecting us and may be in the category of certification of tech comm’ers. We try to treat our work like a guild or a craft or something an individual does – and it’s a collaborative adventure, so while it’s good to think of integrity of one’s work, there is not a single set of tools. We are always learning.
  • Natural user interfaces (NUIs) – get ready for it. Our interfaces are being revolutionized.

Conclusion
There is such a mix of insights in this webcast. Some are genuine future-facing trends that are worth articulating; some are backward-facing trends that will die out.

Finally, let me suggest that we watch out what we call a “trend”; in the 1990s we talked about “emerging trends in technical communication”. It was as if the trend was coming about slowly and almost imperceptibly. We didn’t know how disruptive the Web, social media, and a grinding economy would be to our profession or what’s left of it. Now it seems that there are so many more disruptive technologies affecting us than there are trends, per se. If anything, disruption is the new trend.

Posted in Criticism, Future, Information Architecture, Interface, Profession, Roles | Tagged , , , , , | 2 Comments

Compendiumania

Posted on March 9, 2011 by Bill

Isn’t there just this urge to organize and systematize information? If only we could get it all under control. Well I have a small idea in that regard.

I came across Clive Shepherd’s blog whose latest blog posts about informal learning and self-study somewhat relate to my previous post about the trade-offs of conferences and interacting online. But what led me to his blog was his mention of a book I had just looked at: Universal Principles of Design, by William Lidwell, Kritina Holden and Jill Butler (Rockport, 2003). There’s a newer edition out now, with even more principles; my boss had the old one sitting on his desk, so I borrowed it. Clive summed it up. It is, he wrote,

“a gloriously-presented compendium of 100 design ideas that, if not universal, can certainly be applied in a wide variety of settings.”

What is is about compendiums and encyclopedias and taxonomies that we like? The book is, even at the newer version’s 125 principles, both concise and yet encyclopedic at the same time. It seems like an ambitious undertaking and yet, somehow, the authors succeed. It’s a great collection, a worthy reference, if you have space on your bookshelf for one more book.

Cover of Universal Principles of Design Book

Originally, I was going to compose a review of their book but that’s not the main point of this post. I could go on about how odd it seemed that some of their principles seem to be prescriptive processes (“Development Cycle”, “Interation”, “Prototyping”) or how some seemed too specific and could be generalized (“Fibonacci Sequence”, “Golden Rule”). I could put on my editor’s hat and say their naming of principles was inconsistent (sometimes a law named after a person, sometimes a descriptive phrase, sometimes an obvious summary, sometimes not.) Or I could go on about how they did a great job of organizing a seemingly intractable and subjective topic.

Rather than a review of their book, though, I’d like to offer a challenge to the authors. I would like an online version. And I don’t just mean a Google Docs version where I can see the book online. I mean, if it is going to be universal and always-applicable, shouldn’t we have it available to everyone to add to, correct, comment on, rate, etc.? Wouldn’t a wiki or editable site be a better way of publishing it so we can build on it and add to it as our knowledge and experience grows. Think of the examples you could link to each principle. Think of the different way of indexing the principles. An online and social version would be so much more helpful. Of course the authors could be the self-proclaimed gatekeepers if they wanted, but allow more of us to provide input.

Posted in Criticism, Design, Information Architecture, Review | Tagged , , , , | 1 Comment

Top 5 Reasons to Avoid a Tech Comm Conference

Posted on March 8, 2011 by Bill

Warning: There is some ranting in this post that may sound like STC bashing. I intend it solely as constructive criticism and fodder for brainstorming sessions for the benefit of the profession and of STC.

Once again, Tom Johnson fulfills a need in the professional community by giving us interviews of STC candidates on his web site. It would be great if STC would provide this service and post them on their web site so it is more readily available to those of us in the profession, or at least provide a link to Tom’s site. I looked on the STC site and there are questions and answers all typed up and posted. In an age of multiple media and immediate access, it’s funny that there are no links to Twitter feeds or Facebook pages, no audio files to download, no chat sessions or forums for interaction with the candidate beyond filling out a form and clicking Submit. One would expect more from a professional association dedicated to technical communication.

In her interview, Vici Koster-Lenhardt referred to business communicators, web designers, information architects as competitors of ours. I thought they were our colleagues. I thought they were us. As layoffs have shrunk the workforce, the work load increases and we, as our bosses have told us, have learned to work smarter, have learned new skills, have had to keep up with the demands of the increasingly complex and increasingly online workforce. In fact we wear multiple hats and have multiple skills. I hope no one at STC thinks that these are not part of the domain of our profession?

  • Social media
  • Content strategy
  • User Interface (UI) design
  • User experience (UX)
  • Information Architecture
  • Knowlegebase management
  • Online training
  • Content management systems
  • User assistance

In another blog post, Tom says how wonderful it is that there are so many conferences –
Lots of Conferences Taking Place. While I agree those are great conferences, I can’t help but wonder. Isn’t that fragmentation really a symptom of what has happened without a unifying professional association that could serve as an umbrella. Another missed opportunity by STC. The challenge for STC is not to figure out how to survive, but to wake up to why it shunned most of the profession and allowed those of us in the profession to go off and start out own associations and conferences. When STC was not providing a service or providing a way for talented professionals to get involved, we went off and found another solution.

In response to Kai Weber’s Top 5 Reasons to Attend a Tech Comm Conference,
let me offer a alternate view. Here are Top 5 Reasons NOT to Attend a Tech Comm Conference:

  1. Learn as much about methods and trends online by using search, looking at videos on SlideShare and YouTube because it’s more readily available, free, and accessible anytime from anywhere.
  2. Check out tools and new versions – better online – download trials, have WebExs and see demos, all online. Interact directly with the manufacturer online at a time of your convenience customized to your needs. Do conferences still have booths that give out free stuff? I don’t think that’s a reason to attend a conference. Most conferences meet once a year. But versions are coming out more frequently and tools are changing more frequently.
  3. Meet experts and make friends – yes, but you can also connect online with Facebook, Twitter and then use MeetUp and other sites for coordinating a meeting with those professionals. Not saying it’s the same, but for the price… And again, is once a year enough?
  4. Because the hive mind is not at the conference, it’s online. Get real; go virtual.
  5. I don’t need conferences to meet friends. Though it does help you realize you’re not alone. Okay, so I eliminated one of my five reasons not to attend.
  6. But here are some others – it’s expensive to attend, it’s expensive to fly, it’s exhausting, you are limited by how far you can go by foot, you can only attend one thing at a time, and things can go wrong. The reality is that big conferences are shrinking and for many (good) reasons. More information is online and that makes it more readily available when and where you need it. An conferences are not held often enough to keep up with the growth of information and the growing demands of the workforce.

Am I going too far? How about another reason – tech comm is out of touch. By not realizing how much is happening online, by ignoring how online communication and social media works or downplaying its importance, we are putting blinders on and missing a huge part of our profession. If that last one isn’t good enough reason, let’s try another. This one goes beyond Kai’s list. A better conference would be one that brought multiple disciplines together because that doesn’t happen often or easily. Engineers, designers, developers, writers, trainers, tech supporters – all together. Now that’s a conference. Instead of a dedicated specialist conference, a conference should pull together the groups that STC thinks are disparate or competitive. Let’s bring content strategists and UX professionals together; let’s have user assistance developers and information architects meet. Let’s get a dialog going instead of retreating to our corners with our specialties. The silos at work are breaking down. Let’s break down the walls between our conferences.

So you see, I’m not really saying don’t go to conferences. I’m saying don’t forget about all the new ways to connect. I’m suggesting that STC could take on a bigger role if it had the vision. As a profession, we need to better communicate the opportunities we have and learn to use our new forms of media to improve everyone’s work.

Posted in Conferences, Criticism, Information Architecture, Profession, Professional Association, Social Networking | Tagged , , | 15 Comments

User Scenarios in Five Acts

Posted on March 6, 2011 by Bill

This past month has been a flurry of activity with the design of a new Web application interface and I have to say there are challenges at many levels. I am working on a team that takes Agile processes seriously. Doing user interface design in such an environment is fun and fast-paced. Capturing and communicating knowledge about the user is one of those major aspects of a project that often goes unspoken but never should be overlooked. While I had previously developed some personas and had developed some user interface requirements, my boss, in a major stroke of genius (though he insists it was simply desperation) this month developed a quite comprehensive set of user scenarios and wrote it down in one document in the form of, of all things, a play.

Now a set of user scenarios could be a lengthy document and could be a bit boring to an average developer to have to read in order to understand the needs of users, but by putting it in the form of a play, with a cast of characters (users), a setting (actually two locations) and acts (a sequence of user scenarios that built on each other), he produced a very enjoyable and readable statement of requirements. His particular play had five acts, each with a different user experiencing a different aspect of our product in their particular context.

Granted, it is unlikely to ever develop into a screen play or go on to win an Academy Award for best motion picture, but the document had enough entertainment value to make it quite easily consumable by even those of us jaded with easy access to online entertainment. And it made the name of the fictitious users memorable; it made the situations of the users understandable. Setting user scenarios in a framework of a play is an idea I will use in future projects. I pass it on to any of you struggling to get management, stakeholders, or developers to better understand your users or your user interface design.

Posted in User Experience, User Scenarios, Web Applications | Tagged , , , , | 2 Comments

User Participation Design

Posted on March 4, 2011 by Bill

I’m getting tired of focusing on user interface design. At my work, lately, we have been using the car analogy – referring to the back end software as the engine (which does all the important work) and the user interface as the body and interior. But with all the early designs of the car when it was first being invented and made manufacturable on a larger scale, the user interface was ALWAYS part of the design. No one was inventing cars that just drove on their own. They were all meant to transport humans and be controlled by humans. There wasn’t a separation between engine and user interface. And it’s really not about user interface as if first you design something that works (for non-humans?) and then later design a way for humans to interface with it. That’s weird. I think we should be thinking more about human participation from the beginning. I mean, if you can automate something, fine, automate it. If it doesn’t need a human (a “user” – as if anything but a human would be using it), then design away and leave out worrying about human participation. But if it needs human participation, then design human participation or user participation into it. Don’t separate it out as something that comes later, after the fact. At what point did we separate out user interface design? At what point did we find ourselves outside the spaceship asking HAL to let us back in? When did we start playing with the user interface as something that needed to find a problem it solved? Something weird is definitely going on.

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Spring Cleaning

Posted on February 26, 2011 by Bill

Although it is a little early to talk about Spring, its not too early to talk about cleaning, as in cleaning out the old stuff and making room for new stuff or just making room for its own sake. You see, as a northerner who has moved to the south, I have had to make some changes. It took a few years, but eventually I realized, as all northerners who move south do, that I don’t need all my sweaters and coats, and at some point, I just had to get rid of most of that. It was a few years back, but I took a trip to the Goodwill or Salvation Army and just cleaned out all those unneeded garments. Well, this is my analogy for what has been going on at my work in the last few years.

At some point a few years ago, I realized that I was a technical writer in an online world, and that there was no reason to keep holding on to all the old hard copy revisions of the manuals I had written. I had even written about the trend, Beyond the Paper Platform in which I suggested that the goal is not the paperless office but the office-less office, getting rid of many of the physical limitations afforded by the computer. And once I got started, I really cleaned out. It was time for Spring cleaning of a sort. And I have not regretted the removal of what was becoming clutter. I no longer have any filing cabinets in my office; I no longer keep old hard copy versions; I no longer have a literal inbox on my desk and all the papers are gone. Our work has moved from paper to online. There comes a point when you just say, no more hard copy, no more printing. It takes up too much room; it takes up too much valuable time; and it is not what the customer wants anyway. We can move beyond the limitations that paper imposed.
Clutter to Clean Out

And now just as I am getting settled with that, I have realized that it is time for yet another level of Spring cleaning. The next move is to remove all the icons from my computer desktop; remove all those applications that I was using and move my work to the collaborative cloud where my individual desktop with its applications are not as vital as before. And I will make the move for the same reasons – to overcome the limitations of the individual desktop. Now I can work on the web and save my data there, no longer worrying about how big my hard drive is. My local hard drive is becoming what my filing cabinet used to be, once so precious but now barely looked at. Soon I will do all my work in the cloud on any of my mobile devices and I will not have a desktop, I will not have a literal office, and I will be able to collaborate with any number of fellow professionals anywhere in the world.

Following Oracle’s numbering of their releases from 8i and 9i (i for Internet) and 10g and 11g (g is for grid), maybe the next release will be 12c (c for cloud). Maybe for the next generation of users, the two-letter abbreviation PC will not mean Personal Computer but Private Cloud.

Posted in Future, Practices, Profession | Tagged , , | Comments Off

Context Strategy

Posted on February 21, 2011 by Bill

Here are my Top 10 tips about how we talk about the design of the user experience. We often focus on the user interface and forget about the overall experience. For my work on Web applications, which are different from Web sites, it’s not so much about the content strategy but the context strategy, because we need to consider the user’s process, their business process, their overall business context.

1. Everyone is an expert of the UI – it doesn’t take an expert to know when a UI is bad. The challenge isn’t to know when a UI is bad; the challenge is to have the resources to fix it in a timely manner or at least to capture the feedback you are getting.

2. It is easy to point to the UI or UX experts but it is not so easy to have a UX expert on the team and give them say in the design. For a team of developer who are used to working on their own, the designer or other member need to be integrated with the team with equal status.

3. The user experience isn’t just the UI. That is so obvious and so easily overlooked. There is a difference between UI design and UX design.

4. The software isn’t finished when the developers can get it to work on their machines; the product works when the user uses it on their machine in their process when they want to.

5. Web apps (web applications) are not web sites. There is a vast difference between deploying a Web application at a customer’s site than posting a Web site on our own servers.

6. Web Apps are not desktop apps. There is a vast difference between allowing users to run an application on a Web server and allowing them to run an application on a desktop computer. But there is also a difference between how a Web application is deployed and used than how a desktop application is installed and used.

7. You can create all the design patterns and style guides that you want, but if the developers do not follow them, then you are not going to get the consistency you want.

Okay, when I get three more good ones from your comments, I will add them to my list and round it out to ten. Come on, give me some good ones.

Posted in User Experience, Web Applications | Tagged , , , | 1 Comment