Heidi Hansen's blog

Top 10 Mistakes UX Designers Make

2012-01-31T21:42:00.000-08:00

Scott Berkun posted a wonderful write-up of the SIGCHI event that I attended last Thursday night at the Mercer Island Community Center (a great, central location if ever there was one in the Seattle area for a professional society presentation--loved it).

Be sure to check out Scott's excellent write-up of the event that the SIGCHI board member and I live-tweeted:

In Scott's words: http://www.scottberkun.com/blog/2012/the-top-mistakes-ux-designers-make-the-writeup/
Live tweets that occurred that night: http://www.twitter.com/heidilhansen
Live tweets from SIGCHI that night: http://www.twitter.com/pssigchi
We used the hashtag #uxmistakes and you might like to check out Scott's tweets: http://twitter.com/berkun

Trends in Technical Communication

2012-01-31T21:35:00.000-08:00

Today I listened to the free Trends in Technical Communication webcast with Sarah O'Keefe of Scriptorium and Char James-Tanny; both are continually keeping up with trends, so it was an informative hour. Here are the primary trends:

cloud, structured authoring (XML-based authoring such as with DITA), short help video, mobile Help, eBook output

I look forward to the next Scriptorium webcast about HTML5--should be great.

60 Minutes Segment about Prodigy Jake=inspiring

2012-01-17T21:51:00.000-08:00

When I see 60 Minutes segments about child prodigies, I get motivated to do more with my time. One of those segments aired this past Sunday, and I have thought about my personal productivity and what I'm doing with my gifts each day since then. How I spend my time has been on my mind more lately; I had a college professor who really helped me think through how I spend my time and use my gifts, so I have been thinking about that critical thinking professor more lately, too. Like maybe I should be passing the CPA exam as an intellectual hobby in my spare time after all. Or take time to get much better at Win8, HTML5, CSS3 development. And this all ties into the Life of Reading versus Life of Writing post that Tom Johnson wrote last week.

http://www.cbsnews.com/8301-18560_162-57358845/jake-math-prodigy-proud-of-his-autism/

Books Read Update

2012-01-17T21:43:00.000-08:00

Books Read in 2012 (1)
Real Marriage by Driscoll
half of the Steve Jobs biography by Isaacson (still reading it)
half of The Design of Future Things by Don Norman (still reading it)

half of Living with Complexity by Don Norman (still reading it)

half of Change By Design by Tim Brown (still reading it)

half of The Complete Idiot's Guide to HTML5 and CSS3 by Joe Kraynak (still reading it)

half of The Bible (still reading it)

Books Read in 2011 (10)

half of Change by Design by Tim Brown (still reading it)

half of Living with Complexity by Don Norman (still reading it)

half of the Steve Jobs biography by Isaacson (still reading it)

Saving Your Marriage Before It Starts: Seven Questions to Ask Before---and After---You Marry by Parrott

The Duggars: 20 and Counting! by Duggar

Don Norman article about why human-centered design is harmful and activity-based design is better

2011-12-09T10:55:00.001-08:00

Travis Martin, Univ of Washington UCD Master's program graduate, encouraged me to read this article by Don Norman (and I'm glad he did...next I think I'll read Don Norman's latest book because I've read most of his others):
http://www.jnd.org/dn.mss/human-centered_design_considered_harmful.html

To-do list before Feb

2011-12-08T08:36:00.001-08:00

To-do list before February:

Create the online portfolio as mentioned in the post about three back.

Look into building a Metro app: https://buildwindowscontest.com/
Learn some Korean.
Add a picture to LinkedIn, add details and skills to the verbiage on LinkedIn.
Read a professional development book, such as Change By Design. Then read 2 more professional development books.

My Twitter page

2011-12-07T09:13:00.001-08:00

My tweets are here:
http://twitter.com/heidilhansen

Seattle Girl Geek Dinner #13

2011-12-07T09:08:00.001-08:00

Fun professional development is described below--I love these free evenings that inspire those women attending to do great things. My favorite speakers so far have been from an XBOX Kinect PM and an Amazon Cloud team PM. This came to my inbox from the organizers (I made a couple edits to it, but it's below so that you get the feel of these great evenings):

Seattle Girl Geek Dinner #13
Our speakers from Microsoft Advertising will be discussing their backgrounds, why Microsoft, and how AdCenter is rocking the world of advertising!
Speakers:Kirti Khanna, Principal Program Manager Lead
Holly Knight, Principal Program Manager
If you have registered but decide you do not want to attend, if you could kindly withdraw your name from the list, that would be great. Over 50 people on the waitlist. Can only allow 1 guest per Geek Girl for this event. If you have registered more than one guest, please update your ticket status.
Parking:
Contour is located in the heart of downtown Seattle at 807 - 1st Avenue, Seattle WA 98104. Located between Marion St. and Columbia St. on the west side of 1st Ave. Parking will not be covered, however, there are several convenient paid parking lots nearby.
Heavy appetizers, beer, and wine will be served.

Up to lately - random comments

2011-11-20T15:17:00.001-08:00

Here is what I have been up to lately:

Got my Masters in Professional Accountancy from Central Washington University - Lynnwood campus. I used to work as a Technical Writer, then Senior Technical Writer, then User Assistance Lead, then Program Manager now. I love building software. I love usability. I currently help build ERP software that I think has a great user experience (UX).
Seattle Geek Girl dinners. These have been excellent. My favorite ones have been the Kinect presentation and Amazon.com presentation. Usually I blog about these, but I think that I only did a few Twitter posts about them. I almost went to the SIGCHI meeting last month, but then I decided that I would just read Arnie Lund's book instead because the presentation and book contained the same content.
I have continued to read the "I'd Rather be Writing" blog. Great stuff every post.
I want to read the new Steve Jobs biography. I want to read a few professional development books, so maybe something on PM-ing or something on agile development.
I want to get a portfolio online. Six-month or 12-month goal. Something like this: sample portfolio.
I was inspired by the World Usability Day presentations. The "motion" video was especially good. You can view the program at the WUD MS page: World Usability Day Microsoft.
I have really been enjoying my job lately. Work hard. Play hard.
Speaking of playing hard, I lost 40 pounds this year. Cycle class continues to be fun, even four months later.
I started the year with the goal to pass the CPA exam. I decided to put that aside for a future year and focus on health instead. I hate not achieving goals, but the weight loss and meeting a lot of new, wonderful people have made the sting of not achieving that goal much more tolerable. I am craving new professional development lately, so I will be doing more of that. Life is interesting, intriguing, and fun.
Volunteering=served as the tech on Thursday nights, serve coffee and tea at church, donate blood. Will do some additional donating before the year is done.

Books read over the years

2011-11-20T15:03:00.001-08:00

Books read over the years:

Books Read in 2012 (10)

half of Change by Design by Tim Brown (still reading it)

half of Living with Complexity by Don Norman (still reading it)

half of the Steve Jobs biography by Isaacson (still reading it)

Saving Your Marriage Before It Starts: Seven Questions to Ask Before---and After---You Marry by Parrott

The Duggars: 20 and Counting! by Duggar

A Love that Multiplies by Michelle and Jim Bob Duggar
Redemption by Wilkerson
Preparing for Marriage by Rainey
Not a Fan by Idleman
Vintage Jesus by Driscoll
Religion Saves by Driscoll
Forgotten God by Chan
Freedom by Franzen
half of The Bible

Books Read in 2011 (6)
First Things First by Warner
Why Good Things Happen to Good People by Post
On Writing by Stephen King
The Shallows by Carr
The Last Lecture by Pausch
The Shack by Young

Books Read in 2010 (35)
A Great and Glorious Game by Giamatti
The Rewards of Simplicity by Pierce
Lit by Mary Karr
The Mysteries of Pittsburgh by Chabon
Enduring Love by McEwan
A Home at the End of the World by Cunningham
Amsterdam by Ian McEwan
Vampire Maker by Schiefelbein
The Teammates: A Portrait of Friendship by Halberstam
Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit by Winterson
Moneyball by Michael Lewis
Last Night in Twisted River by Irving
The Baseball Fan's Bucket List: 162 things you must see, do, get, and experience before you die
Hot, Flat, and Crowded by Friedman
Three Cups of Tea by Greg Mortenson
The Power of Half by Salwen
The Reluctant Spy by John Kiriakou
A Whole New Mind: Why Right-brainers Will Rule the Future by Pink
How We Decide by Lehrer
Half the Sky by Kristof and WuDunn
Hard work: a life on and off the court by Roy Williams
A Thousand Splendid Suns by Hosseini
Drive: The Surprising Truth About What Motivates Us by Pink
Big Russ and Me by Tim Russert
K2: Life and Death on the World's Most Dangerous Mountain
NurtureShock: New Thinking About Children
Stones into Schools by Mortenson
Shooting Stars by James
Highest duty by Sully Sullenberger
Ahead of the Curve: Two Years at Harvard Business School by Broughton
Building Facebook Applications for Dummies by Wagner
Googled by Auletta
The Accidental Billionaires about Facebook by Mezrich
Contemporary Auditing by Knapp
Understanding Accounting Ethics by Cheffers

Books Read in 2009 (15)
Strategy, 2008-2009 by Ketchen
Rethinking Performance Measurement by Meyer
Fundamentals of Financial Management by Houston
Governmental and Nonprofit Accounting by Allison
American Original about Antonin Scalia by Biskupic
Rehnquist: A Personal Portrait by Obermayer
Outliers by Gladwell
Leaving Microsoft to Change the World by Wood
Fundamentals of Cost Accounting by Lanen
Mastering Microsoft SQL Server 2005 by Gunderloy
Auditing by Arens
Information Technology Auditing and Assurance by Singleton
You Can Pass the CPA Exam, Get Motivated by Hopkins
Bisk CPA Review: Regulation 2009-2010
Fundamentals of Business Law by Miller
Essentials of Investments by Kane

Books Read in 2008 (11)
Sharepoint 2003 for Dummies by Williams
Yes, You Can Supercharge Your Portfolio by Ben Stein
The Snowball: Warren Buffett and the Business of Life by Schroeder
The Logic of Life by Harford
Fundamentals of Financial Management by Houston
Management Accounting by Kaplan
Intermediate Accounting, 10th ed. by Bazley
Waiting by Ha Jin
The Imagination Challenge by Manu
Database Design, Application Development, and Administration by Mannino
West Federal Taxation 2008: Individual Income Taxes by Hoffman

Books Read in 2007 (18)
An Infinity of Little Hours
Interaction Design: Beyond Human-Computer Interaction
Yes, You Can Get a Financial Life!
Balzac and the Little Chinese Seamstress
Professional XML
User-Centered Design Stories
Deep Economy
Not Buying It
The WetFeet Insider Guide to Careers in Accounting
The Audacity of Hope
The Rice Mother
The Torrents of Spring
The Money Book for the Young, Fabulous & Broke
First Look 2007 Office
Secrets of RSS
Slow is Beautiful
In Praise of Slowness
Conservatize Me

Books Read in 2006 (22)
Who Really Cares: The Surprising Truth about Compassionate Conservatism
Living History
China, Inc.
Gone Tomorrow: Hidden Life of Garbage
Javascript Demystified
Javascript in 10 Steps or Less
Javascript: A Visual Blueprint
Now It's My Turn
Object-Oriented ASP.net
Our Underachieving Colleges
Strapped
The Overspent American
The Progress Paradox
The Tipping Point
Blink
The Wal-mart Way
The Year of Magical Thinking
Winning the Loser's Game
Why We Buy
DOM Scripting
Alderwood Manor
China Candid

Books Read in 2005 (23)
Ask the Pilot
ASP.NET in 24 Hours
Better Off
Bowling Alone
Emotional Design
Freakonomics
I'm a Stranger Here Myself
In a Sunburned Country
Leading Geeks
Managers Not MBAs
Naked Economics
Place of Learning, Place of Dreams
Suburban Nation
The Fortune at the Bottom of the Pyramid
The Geography of Thought
The Namesake
The Paradox of Choice
The World is Flat
Travels of a T-shirt
Until I Find You
Why Read?
Winning by Jack Welch
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Notes from David Farkas, PhD, about Troubleshooting type help topics

2010-10-20T07:33:00.000-07:00

Last night I heard University of Washington professor, David Farkas (PhD), talk about Troubleshooting help topics with about 40 other people in Redmond at Microsoft, as part of the Society for Technical Communication (STC) Puget Sound chapter's October monthly meeting. Professor Farkas will post slides by Friday morning to his UW faculty site:
http://faculty.washington.edu/farkas/

Here briefly were some take-aways:

Users are always engaging in a cost-benefit analysis, and they can go elsewhere or they can decide they don't think the troubleshooting will help. Does your troubleshooting topic look inviting and do-able?
One troubleshooting topic might be good because others would make the user go to five different places.
The title that you give to your troubleshooting topic can be in 1st person or 3rd person, whatever, but the important thing to remember is to phrase it in the form of the user's complaint:

"I cannot connect to XYZ."
"My computer no longer plays audio."
"XYZ freezes or closes."

If the user can observe it, put it in the title, but if the user cannot observe it, don't put it in the title. In other words, don't use vague references in the troubleshooting title, phrase it so that the user can match what they observe with what your title says (e.g., BAD=XYZ will not initialize...this is bad because most likely "will not initialize" is not directly observable by the user).
Don't forget in the body of your troubleshooting topic to instruct users to test/verify, because it is possible that they have already fixed their issue but do not know it.
When asked about forums/wikis and other user-generated content, it was stated that generally these avenues are best implemented as a mere compliment to live chat/support and professionally crafted troubleshooting topics. The quality of the content on forums tends to be low, but they can be a good place for professionals to get ideas for crafting future professionally written troubleshooting topics. Sometimes a back and forth with live chat is the best avenue, but this tends to be expensive, so a quality troubleshooting topic can be much more cost effective.
What if the younger generation is more used to just playing around and "figuring it out"? Troubleshooting topics might be great for these people who generally tend to skip the online help's regular procedural topics. But if someone is looking at an error message and has no idea how to fix it, even if they are not someone who tends to use online help, they will seek out a troubleshooting topic because they realize at that point that they genuinely do need help.

Here was the blurb about this meeting that was used by the chapter as the meeting overview:

"Troubleshooting procedures can provide much-needed assistance when users encounter bugs, incompatibilities and other problems as they navigate a new UI. There are many different ways to design troubleshooting procedures. But what will work best with your help system, manual or intranet? In a lively, amply illustrated presentation, UW Professor Dave Farkas demonstrates that troubleshooting procedures always exhibit a diagnosis-resolution structure. Understanding this structure is central to effective design." $10 members/$15 nonmembers; 6 PM Social Hour (light dinner), 7 PM Presentation

Some links to Wired and Fast Company that I liked

2010-02-13T10:46:00.000-08:00

I posted these to FB, but here they are...enjoyed these articles a lot about where technology has been and where it might be going...
The one about Japan is for my reference because I plan to visit that place in the next few years (as well as eat a lot of sushi on that trip)...

http://www.wired.com/magazine/2009/12/fail_oracle/

http://www.wired.com/magazine/2009/12/test_steven_levy/

http://www.fastcompany.com/magazine/141/to-sell-or-not-to-sell.html

http://www.fastcompany.com/magazine/142/killer-apps.html

Outlook for CPAs is encouraging

2010-02-13T10:17:00.000-08:00

This was a nice addition to my Saturday morning:

"Occupational Handbook" from the BLS (Bureau of Labor Statistics) at the Department of Labor reports that job growth for accountants and auditors should surpass 20% through 2018.

http://cpatrendlines.com/2010/02/04/bls-projects-strong-jobs-outlook-for-accountants/

Also, I will post more in March when things are a little less busy with classwork. Specifically, I need to update my Books Read (or Books Listened To) and latest thoughts had while commuting.

Upcoming books that I'll be reading

2009-08-01T19:31:00.001-07:00

In between costing accounting textbook reading, I plan to read Talent is Overrated and The Hard Truth about Soft Skills. Also, a couple of work-related books are also on my agenda (governmental accounting related). Also, I think that I skimmed the book Enough by Bogle but need to take another look, so I just reserved that from the library, too. Three Cups of Tea is also on my library list, request pending.
Also, as an update to the March post earlier this year, the Info Systems class and Auditing classes are now finished. Cost accounting will be finished in mid-August. Then it's on to Strategy class this fall and then some seminar classes and a tax class to wrap up the degree next June. Then I might take a short break but then I want to dive right into the CPA exam review classroom-based prep courses so that I can pass the 4 sections before IFRS hits and moves GAAP over. I refreshed my blog's look a little today, too, so check it out if you only read this blog by RSS.

Room to Read is a great charity where almost nothing goes to Admin costs

2009-07-29T07:59:00.000-07:00

Just finished the book Leaving Microsoft to Change the World by John Wood. It goes great with Who Really Cares by Arthur Brooks and Outliers by Malcolm Gladwell. The Wood book made me recall all the wonderful Saturday mornings that my grandma took me to the library (and I would check out the maximum allowed). And years later I would walk into the library and declare to myself that I wanted to read every book that the library had. And to this day part of the way that I recharge is by reading (my other favorite way is by swimming). The Wood book did more than help me recharge; it is something that I will think about many days of my life in the future, I'm sure.

I read Outliers a few weeks ago and highly recommend that. Tom Johnson on I'd Rather be Writing has a nice review of Outliers on his blog.

(book photo courtesy of Amazon.com)

Mixed bag post: short update, websites of possible interest, such as turn blogs into podcasts, free translation, a Twitter mashup

2009-05-10T09:32:00.000-07:00

I read the Sunday and Monday #stc09 Twitter posts, but I still need to catch up on the Tuesday and Wednesday posts with the #stc09 Twitter hashtag. I read Tom's blog post about the conference, and it was great. I think that I would have had similar reactions to things as him. As I did with the #writersua conference, I want to read some conference write-ups and then react to them on my blog. Today is a day of going for a walk, watching the last 9 holes of the island 17th green tournament, and studying for two tests this upcoming week. The classes this quarter are "Auditing" and "Information systems audit/security," and both classes are really enjoyable. This Masters is a great fit for me.

Sunday diversions - websites of note:
http://www.ebook-look.com/ (browse eBooks)

http://senko.net/services/googtext/ (upload gettext .PO files, select languages, and then you have instantly translated help text)

http://www.jollo.com/ (free online translation, compare translations from multiple translation services, such as Google Translate plus others)

http://www.listentoblogs.com/ (blogs come out as podcasts)

http://www.tweetstacker.com/ (log into Twitter as different users at the same time)

Life after Gates, Microsoft trends, Microsoft Help v3, and random thoughts related to writersUA

2009-04-04T11:57:00.000-07:00

I need to read a few chapters in Auditing and Info Systems Audit Control and Security, but I took some time this AM to read Sarah Maddox's notes from the WritersUA conference. Here are my thoughts on her notes:

First, I LOVE it when conference attendees write a one-day wrap-up blog post and title it Day 1, Day 2, and Day 3. I used to do this when I attended about 10 STC conferences in a row, so I know it takes time to do but it is so kind to do because it is so helpful for those of us who had to miss the conference but would have attended that same session if we had been there. So, many thanks Sarah for your daily write-ups.

She had pictures. Just makes it way more fun to read her posts because she took the time to snap and post pictures with the sessions, too. Great stuff.

Thoughts on her Day 3 post: http://ffeathers.wordpress.com/2009/04/03/writersua-2009-day-3/ iPhone development primer. great stuff both the write-up and the content of the session from the sounds of it. Jared Spool and magic write-up--ehh, not my thing but Spool is always funny and worth hearing so sounded like it was fun to be there for that one. Open source tools, free PDF generators, free webconferencing with screensharing and recording, really great tips. This is the fun way to keep up on trends; I posted a few tweets based on these open source tools notes because there were some gems in there.

My thoughts on her Day 2 notes: http://ffeathers.wordpress.com/2009/04/02/writersua-2009-day-2/ post-Gates era was interesting...was presented by a writer who follows Msoft and her thoughts about the current priorities (yes, usability is seen as important in her view of Msoft's view), which businesses are profitable (Business Solutions for one), how to position themselves in the future (get consumers and then it will generate more sales for the Business stuff), Documentation with wikis session notes (2 sessions) looked good for those into wiki doc right now or thinking about doing it.

My thoughts on her Day 1: http://ffeathers.wordpress.com/2009/04/01/writersua-2009-day-1/
Scott McCloud of the Google Chrome comic. Looks as though this presentation was good for getting more buzz around mashups, and I am a big fan of making API use more mainstream.
ISO 26514 standards session notes from Maddox are worth looking into because it relates to the Body of Knowledge effort going on in STC right now. All this stuff contributes to higher standards, which is something that I enjoy reading about because it goes along with Steve McConnell's work that he's done for programmers.
http://www.amazon.com/s/ref=nb_ss_gw?url=search-alias%3Dstripbooks&field-keywords=steve+mcconnell&x=0&y=0

Tony Self talking about DITA: best tidbit from Maddox's notes: "A new document will be available soon for download or reading online: It’s title will be along the lines of the DITA Help Technologies Guide."

Sandcastle looked interesting...use Sandcastle to document APIs, it does some extractions for you to make Help authoring automated to some extent. Open source.

Microsoft Help v.3 sneak preview - interesting stuff, they are currently talking to tools vendors which is great, will be .zip file based, API available, SDK available, open source, Web browser style, slick new Viewer, the best part of this write-up was the fact that the Msoft presenter talked about Help usability statistics that she's found, so here is that part of Sarah Maddox's notes quoted from her write-up (but go read all her notes because they're really great):
"She showed us the results of user studies. There was an interesting graph showing what people have relied on to find information in Visual Studio: Usage of the index has grown steadily over time. Use of TOC has also grown. Use of F1 (to start help) has decreased. Use of the local Search (as opposed to a Google or other internet search) first grew and then dropped and has now flatlined at 10%."

Needless to say, that quote about the usability statistics is contrary to what I thought. I thought that F1 was super popular and was increasing in usage and that use of an Index/TOC was dead, but I guess I was wrong. Usage of Search is always interesting. I think that the big thing for Help authors to know is not so much what these statistics were but instead to try to be getting to a point where you're tracking your own. For example, do you know what users are searching for? Do you know which of your topics are far and away the most popular? Do you let users give a thumbs up or thumbs down with a suggestion? Do you know which topics "If you read this topic, others like you are also reading That topic" type of amazon.com things to do with recommendations.
Just yesterday I rated a topic and gave a suggestion, and those things are monitored so I really think that it does help.
So even though I'm a PM now, I still love reading about software trends, and Help trends, especially write-ups from writersUA, are a great place to get up on trends quickly...and not just Help trends, but tech trends in general (the Live tweet streaming wall, etc). Great stuff.
And kudos to Core Dump for posting a link to Maddox's notes, so I could find them...saw Core Dump's post while updating my Google Shared items last night. Looks as though I still need to read CyberText's notes, too. I saw their tweets this past week though which was great.

Accounting textbooks and general update

2009-03-29T18:45:00.000-07:00

Quick general update before I get into the accounting degree update:

The WritersUA conference is going on now. I was looking at the titles of the sessions today and noticing that just reviewing the session titles can give you a good update about tech trends. The session titles were exciting (very UX-centric) and reminded me that I really like the blend of biz/accounting with the UX/UA/software stuff. Reading the titles made me get excited to follow the conference through Twitter updates (writersua is the hashtag to follow), blogposts, searches for presenter materials, etc. Great stuff.
I enjoyed the presentation about Twitter that Tom's wife gave and that Tom posted the podcast for (idratherbewriting.com).
I thought that I would renew my STC membership but ended up not doing it. I will probably rejoin down the road when I'm not so swamped with the evening degree. I still definitely value and respect the Society.
Being a UA for 10 years prepared me well to be a Program Manager. I still have quite a bit of learning and reading to do before I'm able to excel, but a lot of skills transfer directly over. Same with UX professionals, a lot of their skills directly transfer as well. Same as Development, Test, Demo, or Implementers/Trainers; I really don't think that a former UA person makes a better PM than someone from other areas.

Adding on to the PM bullet above, I think what is more important than your background is your personality. Here are some skills that I'm noticing are important:

Patience (must be happy revising the same file 10+ times)
Self-motivation and time management skills (manage your day/time with your own task list you created for yourself, motivation to dig deeply into issues, motivation to revise the requirements for the tenth time, concentration skills)
A willingness to take constructive criticism, organization skills, screen mockup skills, writing skills, verbal communication skills, etc. It's a lot like the technical writing that you do where you dig into a feature, research it, chew it, and then distill it down to concise documentation. Then, as a PM, you communicate it in a variety of ways, including verbally during meetings with Dev/Test/UA/UX. If you are a UA, I think that being a PM is a great way to go, or going to UX is also a great way to go, or staying in UA if you prefer that is also a great way to go. All are slightly different, but for me the PM job is a great fit.

Update on the accounting degree:
I started my accounting Master's degree in January 2008, having never had an accounting class before but having had work experience in accounting, and I have found that I really enjoy the classes. I will finish up in June 2009 and then take review classes and then sit for the CPA exam.
If you want an Accounting education in a bag, here is what I have taken so far, the textbooks used, and what's to come:
* Database Management Systems (accounting systems slant to the DB examples; book not shown, I will post this book one of these days when I retrieve it back from my friend)
* Income Tax Accounting I
* Intermediate Accounting I and II (splitting one textbook into two different classes; classes are quarterly)
* Controllership (management accounting book)
* Intro to Financial Management
* Investments
* Tax/Legal Strategies for Business (business law book)

What's to Come:
* Auditing
* Cost Accounting
* Info Systems, Security, Control, and Audit
* Strategic Management/Business Simulation
* Seminar in Professional Accountancy and Ethics
* Foundations of Income Taxation
* Seminar in Financial Accounting
* Seminar in Auditing
* Master's exam instead of master's thesis

Textbooks so far:

A Week Off from Accounting Master's degree so I am Back to Blogging

2009-03-19T09:50:00.001-07:00

Ahh, finally a week off from school, so I plan to do frequent blogging, and maybe even some blogging from my smartphone. Adding podcasts to the Shuffle right now--can't wait for IdRatherBeWriting, Marketplace, and BusinessWeek Cover Stories this afternoon.

I really like IE8, but it dones't seem to like blogger right now, so I had to switch to the Compose tab so that it would paste my link to t he video below.

In any regard, here is an excellent video about usability in India that I watched in February and really enjoyed: http://www.uwtv.org/programs/displayevent.aspx?rID=11043

SIGCHI and STC upcoming event descriptions, plus an update blurb

2009-01-17T07:53:00.000-08:00

SIGCHI event this upcoming Thursday in downtown Seattle at 7 PM. I won't be there but here are the details (remember that if you are a member, you can do a library checkout of past meetings on DVD, just show up and ask a board member to see the selection available):

Join us for our January meeting where Noah Iliinsky will present on User-Centered Information Design. This presentation teaches a practical process for designing successful informative visuals. It begins by discussing the importance of understanding your audience's needs, and perception and cognition factors that enhance the effectiveness of your visual. This knowledge is then used to inform a step-by step design process, which takes you from a blank page to a complete, successful visual. The process specifically addresses choosing what information to include, where to put it on the page, what it should look like, how it should be labeled, what the links and axes look like.

Bio: "I have spent the last several years thinking about effective approaches to creating diagrams and other types of information visualization. I also work in interface and interaction design, all from a functional and user-centered perspective. Before becoming a designer I was a programmer for several years. I have a master's in Technical Communication from the University of Washington, and a bachelor's in Physics from Reed College."

Meeting location: 600 University St, Seattle, WA 98101

Then, the week after SIGCHI has their Thurs meeting, the STC Puget Sound chapter will have their showcase of peer-reviewed materials:
http://stc-psc.org/

Thursday, January 29th, 6:00-8:00 PM - Peer Review Showcase. Check out displays of all award-winning projects that are available for viewing throughout the evening. Meet with the project creators and find out about their work and processes for taking a quality technical project to the next level. Enjoy a light meal and network with other content developers. Free if you register by noon on Monday, January 26th. After deadline and at the door the fee is $15. At the Bellevue Coast Hotel.

Things with me have been busy. Lots of spec writing, digging into the software at work, connecting with new teammates, and attending presentations. Lots of homework but am enjoying the accounting and finance classes a lot, as usual.

Weekly update 4

2008-12-28T11:37:00.000-08:00

This week was all about family and friends, so lots of phone calls back to the midwest.

This was the week that the bus system had some major issues, so it took me almost 6 hours to get home one night. Yee haa. Needless to say, I worked from home the next day to avoid a repeat of that FUN.

I really liked this WSJ article about the 2009 U.S. job outlook: Avoiding the Ax: Where the Jobs Are

When I work at home, I often just close the door to one of the rooms and let my own body keep the room warm all day. I often turn on the furnace for the first time all day at 4 p.m., so this nytimes article that my uncle/aunt recommended reminded me of that: No Furnaces but Heat Aplenty in ‘Passive Houses’

Watched the DVDs, The Ultimate Gift and Young at Heart, recommend them both. I'll probably go see Doubt in the theater next week.
I loved the book, Who Really Cares, and this nytimes article that my uncle recommended to me is an excellent follow-up to that book: Bleeding Heart Tightwads

Weekly update 3

2008-12-20T16:21:00.000-08:00

Weekly update 3:

This past week had snow, so would have been nice to have transit mashups on my mobile telling me how many minutes until the next bus, as described in a blog post at PW. I don't usually take the bus, but I do when there is snow and ice. Working from home is nice for a couple of days, but then I miss the social aspects and want to be back in the office.
Ordered books for the winter term classes: Essentials of Investments by Bodie, Kane, and Marcus, Intermediate Accounting by Nikolai, and Fundamentals of Business Law by Miller.
Tried the Blackberry Storm at Verizon Wireless.
Twitter hashtags and Facebook status updates are both pretty cool. Thanks goes out to Tom for writing about his enthusiasm for hashtags. Stattweets.com is a way to get score updates and other information about your favorite team, related to Twitter accounts and hashtags.
I looked up snowshoeing and skiing last weekend. There are weekend Gray Line bus trips from Seattle to the slopes, so I might need to do that a couple of times, and my suburb is offering snowshoe trips every weekend in February that I might need to do, too.

Weekly Update 2 - video recording, books on reserve, classes to take

2008-12-14T11:20:00.000-08:00

Last night I recorded 3 videos to share internally with my fellow PMs/team mates so that we can do asyncronous knowledge transfer. I used Office LiveMeeting 2007 to record it. I thought that my audio was recording on the first 2 videos but it wasn't, so I had to go locate the .wmv file in the Sharing folder (under Documents > My Meetings) and then play that in Windows Media Player while I then recorded a new LiveMeeting meeting to capture the audio. Live and learn; it helped me learn LiveMeeting better so was worth it. I also experimented with Microsoft's Expression suite--the Encoder 2 app within the suite is pretty cool; I used it to overlay the audio with the video and then encode that to produce a single .wmv output file.

Found out this week that it's the same cost to take 18 credits (3 classes and change) as it is to take 10 credits (two classes), so I added Investments (Finance class) yesterday as my 3rd class (to go with Intermediate Acctng II and Tax/Legal Strategies for Businesses for upcoming Winter quarter). I thought about tacking on LIB 345 - Library Research Methods (2 credits) on Saturdays from 1-3, but I think that might be prime time for getting my reading and assignments done from the other 3 classes, so I will take the Library class a different term. I was inspired/reminded to take the library class because my friend, squarej, is prepping to tack on an MLS degree to her existing MBA--she posted a tweet about that yesterday so I got that on my mobile.

Discovered the appeal of Facebook this week. Added friends and just generally reconnected. Very fun to trade that time-consumer instead of the textbooks for 3 weeks. Watching the Jets v. Buffalo game right now. Ice and snow on the streets this morning, so took a walk and watched some cars struggle and spin their wheels. I made sure to crunch the snow under my feet to bring back childhood memories.

This past week was a couple of final exams. They went fine.

This past week at work was time spent with users. If you are a software professional and spending time with your users (personas) doesn't jazz you up, something is wrong.

Was at Borders yesterday and saw their display of "If you liked this, you might like this" so I put a few more books on reserve at the library based on that...below

Weekly Short Update 1

2008-12-05T23:23:00.001-08:00

I might do more frequent, shorter posts, just as a quick brain dump of what I've been up to lately. A couple weeks ago I saw a good implementation of Google Video, which was used to put out the previous week's sermon; I could see more professional groups distributing their latest meetings this same way (and, no, I don't attend this church--the example is for the video feature only):
http://www.westgatechapel.com/OtherInfo/vtp.ashx?p=573

Came across this Howlog.com tonight; it seems interesting because it's bookmarking that also gives you the chance to write a short blurb about what you read: http://howlog.com/

I put Outliers, the new Malcolm Gladwell book, on reserve at the library. I am number 136 in 12 holdable copies. I like to see my neighbors interested in the same books as me; I never feel as though the Hold wait is too long. I'm still reading the Snowball Buffett book, but I might finish that slowly over the next several months. I should be studying for my Finance final on Tuesday...will do that tomorrow, Sunday, and Monday. I have really liked every class I've had.

Hodge-podge post of movie recommendations, reading lately list, Malcolm Gladwell Outliers book interview observations

2008-11-27T06:36:00.000-08:00

What I've been reading is below (in addition to the Buffett biography and textbooks), but first a short list of movie recommendations. I had been meaning to visit Hulu.com for a while because I'd heard quite a bit about it, plus I'd heard the trend in the Michael Eisner article that more and more people are not watching prime time TV (and now I just stumbled on an article that talks about how Sling.com has everything that Hulu.com has, but with Sling.com you can watch Live TV shows).

So last night I checked out Hulu.com and watched some movie trailers to see what movies are comoing out soon that I might like. Here is what I might go see so that when Oscar night comes around I'll have seen some of the films.

Body of Lies (maybe watch)
The Boy in the Striped Pajamas (prob a rental, but also theater possibility)
Doubt (theater, I am a big fan of Streep and Seymour Hoffman)
Pride and Glory (rental, but theater quality, I am a big Ed Norton fan)
Cadillac Records (rental, but takes place in 1950s Chicago, so I'll like it)
The Reader (rental, but theater quality, so I might go to the theater to see it)
Synecdoche, New York (the other Seymour Hoffman film, looks darker and more chaotic than the others but also the depth and complexity might be compelling)
Nights in Rodanthe (rental, good ole fashioned chic flick, which I like every now and again)
Sunshine Cleaning (rental, looks like another Little Miss Sunshine funny gem)
The Secret Life of Bees (rental, looks good, I really liked The Great Debaters, so I'll like this, too)
Gran Torino (rental, Clint Eastwood movie about race relations with his Asian neighbors)
Nothing Like the Holidays (rental, I am a Debra Messing fan and like movies about families at Christmas, so I'll probably like this, light entertainment)
Dark Knight (rental, just to watch Heath Ledger's performance due to the Oscar buzz)
The Curious Case of Benjamin Button (another one with Oscar buzz for acting and film)
Changeling (theater, Oscar buzz)
Wall-E (shoe-in for the animated Oscar right now, so either theater or rental)
Milk (rental, Oscar buzz for Sean Penn)
Revolutionary Road (rental, Oscar buzz for best picture and acting)
Australia (rental, best picture Oscar buzz)
Frost/Nixon (rental, looks entertaining and has Oscar buzz)
Flash of Genius (rental, Oscar buzz for Greg Kinnear's performance)
The Visitor (rental, Oscar buzz for actor Jenkins)
Frozen River (rental, Oscar buzz for Melissa Leo)

But more than the movies, I'm most excited about the Malcolm Gladwell interview below that the WSJ did. I really like the part about how Gladwell talks about how people get really good at things because they spend the time needed to get good. Great reminder. Gladwell goes on to say that you also need to put yourself in the company of people who will help move things along for you, for example, Gladwell spends time with smart friends and then gets ideas for his book just by hanging around them.

So one of the ways he writes great books is to spend time scouring footnotes in books (which are like hiking trail droppings for navigating great minds' thoughts and linkages--like hyperlinks before there were hyperlinks) and also spending time among his smart friends. More synthesis. If there's anything that my Honors English 101 class taught me in college, it's the power of synthesis. When I read the footnotes thing, it brought back memories of my friend and me when we were 21 and 22 and finishing a business book every 2 weeks together and then having long phone conversations about its footnotes and how it linked and compared to the other biz book we'd polished off the month before.

And the more I age, the more I realize that the time thing is huge, too. Gladwell was talking about how to get good, you need to spend the time. I'm finding that time gets to be much more of an asset when you're older. It's also a huge thing because so many of us spend time online digesting small chunks, which makes it harder to focus on a 60-page document that could really benefit us, or harder to string together 40 60-page documents, which would be even more valuable to making us more expert in that X thing we want to be more expert in. But to read the 40 documents versus the 3, it takes time, and it also takes focus (which is harder to do now that we multi-task like crazy in 2008). So, it takes time, focus, and discipline. You also can't watch TV, surf the Web, or play with your kids in that time, so most people won't choose to go the 40 document route, they'll choose to go the 3 document route. You also need to choose a career that you get so jazzed about that you actually want to spend time, have focus, and have discipline in that primary area.

I'm noticing this same thing with the Snowball book (Buffet book). Buffett had a lot of time, focus, and discipline, and nothing jazzed him more than business valuation. He also seemed to have skipped watching TV and playing with his kids a ton. But it wasn't all-or-nothing. He did join his wife and kids on many outings when his presence was requested. At Thanksgiving, he used to eat and retreat to go work for several hours. Football took a back seat to his analysis activities.

I switch roles on Monday at work, and I think that I'm already starting to see that with fewer features to focus on, it's going to be really neat to feel as though you're getting time back. Technical writers tend to have to scratch the surface of a lot of features, but program managers are given the time to dig in, which is going to really help gain expertise. The best technical writers find ways to eek out time to really dig into the software they document and come up with field descriptions or procedures that give you the extra, timely info you need, and they also take the time to work on videos or to make themselves more of an expert by reading/working in the software beyond a solitary spec document. To extrapolate Gladwell, most tech writers don't have the time necessary to get great.

Reading lately:

NOVEMBER 25, 2008 Ways Women Can Hold Their Own in a Male World By DANA MATTIOLI
REVIEW & OUTLOOK NOVEMBER 26, 2008 Obama's Rich Revelation Peter Orszag's mission improbable.
REVIEW & OUTLOOK NOVEMBER 26, 2008 The Desolate Wilderness
REVIEW & OUTLOOK NOVEMBER 26, 2008 And the Fair Land
REVIEW & OUTLOOK NOVEMBER 25, 2008 Citi's Taxpayer Parachute Why are Robert Rubin and other directors still employed?
SPORTS NOVEMBER 21, 2008 Let the Pre-Games Begin Site of 2010 Winter Olympics, Vancouver offers top athletes, singers and low prices -- now
BOOKS NOVEMBER 14, 2008, Malcolm Gladwell's Method The writer on talent, curiosity and the importance of practice By JEFFREY A. TRACHTENBERG (Gladwell has a new book out called Outliers: The Story of Success, which I'm going to put on hold at the library now)
HBR Nov 2008 Summary of the articles
Nytimes memo from Islamabad

One last thought: For the new Blackberry Storm, Pogue slammed it and slammed QA, but he didn't seem to mention that this product seems to have muted the user experience (UX) team members (maybe there weren't any). Iterative UX research would have made all the difference for that product (and tech writers raising red flags as they worked with the prototypes to produce the instructional content for it could have made all the difference, or others speaking up, which Pogue did mention).

Getting into the giving spirit

2008-11-16T10:42:00.000-08:00

Every year, in honor of my niece and nephew, I send a shoebox abroad to a boy and girl ages 2-4. I participate along with a big group of other people. Below is the arrow pointing to my kids' shoeboxes among their new friends. Then soon I'll do Angel Tree from Bartell's Drugs, more food pantry donations, Thanksgiving dinner clean-up for Seattle street kids, and Costco Seattle Children's Hospital hot air balloon donation in my niece's and nephew's names, among other giving. Tis the season to go beyond Gingerbread lattes, Pumpkin Spice lattes, hot apple cider, Peppermint mochas, and Christmas music (although these are all great, too).
In 2006, my favorite book that I read all year was about giving: Who Really Cares: The Surprising Truth about Compassionate Conservatism. I'm also a big Dave Ramsey fan, and one of his core messages is to be very generous once you're out of debt, too.

How to fix Word if you want two windows but everything opens in one, plus my thoughts about Android

2008-11-08T22:49:00.000-08:00

Last week, I clicked around too quickly and then after that Word starting opening only one window every time I opened a file, but I wanted two windows, meaning two separate clickable tasks in my taskbar. I did a search in the Help and it didn't help, so I searched for help on Google and it didn't turn up much, so here is what I searched for and then the solution is below; it's remarkably simple to fix but the secret is knowing that it's a quick solution. The following is what I searched for (and then nothing helpful showed up): break word out of opening in a single window document view, word creates only one window for each document, word opens in same window but want two separate windows, and word opens in same window but I want two windows

How to fix:

1. Open Word and then click Office icon (upper left corner of Word) > Word Options button.

2. Click Advanced in the left pane.

3. Under the Display heading, select Show all windows in the Taskbar.

World Usability Day is next week

World Usability Day is November 13. This year's theme is transportation. Quite a few years ago I started noticing when signs aren't placed well enough for them to be helpful, so transportation is a good choice. I also like how cars are starting to have interfaces so that you can talk "through your car" with no need for a mobile phone's headset. Perhaps they already do in high-end cars, but I want normally priced cars to start downloading a few podcast episodes for me while I'm at work so that I can listen to them after getting in my car at the end of the day and initiating the voice command to activate them.

Recently I've started noticing that I would actually pay for things like this, but then old trusty All Things Considered from NPR is so good that I don't know that I would want all these added bells and whistles to trump my usual choice for the commute home. Perhaps I'd only go for the phone calls through my car. Plus, the thing about podcasts is that you can get narrowly focused rather than getting content that might surprise you, meaning content that you really enjoyed but that you would not have requested or normally have stumbled upon. Listening to a miscellany show like All Things Considered gives you a variety of information, but a postcast usually gives you narrower content. Sometimes narrow content is great, but perhaps in general a newspaper that gives you stories you did not know you'd like is better than a trade journal of highly specialized content. Plus lately All Things Considered has had great reports about financial topics, so I have especially been enjoying it.

SIGCHI and STC Seattle-area meetings lately

Speaking of usability, I had to miss the last Puget Sound SIGCHI meeting about mental modeling in UX. Their next meeting (after World Usability Day involvement) is this: Join us on Nov 19th at 6 PM at Google in Seattle for Tom Leung's presentation of "Google's Web Optimizer--Why Google built a testing tool." The cool thing about SIGCHI is that they record all their meetings to DVD, so if you're a member, you can check out the DVD (library-style) and then return it at a future meeting. I'll probably be a member for life, so checking out the DVDs of meetings that I miss due to my accounting evening coursework is definitely in my future. Although I start as a Program Manager on Dec. 1 at the same company that I work for, UX will be just as big of a deal as it is for me now in UA.

I had to miss the last STC meeting, too. It was about translation management systems, which I'm interested in, but as far as I know they don't record meetings, so I'm out of luck. Their next meeting is Nov 18th and will be a panel discussion: "A Microsoft View of Terminology Best Practices."

Book recommendation
I am supposed to be reading my Finance and Management Accounting textbooks, but I read 150 pages in the new book about Warren Buffett in the past 24 hours:
The Snowball: Warren Buffett and the Business of Life

I highly recommend the book because it is inspiring. I especially like the parts where they talk about Buffett's work and study habits, and also how he interacted with people. For example, in his undergraduate days, he'd buy a few of his required textbooks and read them all right away, and then as the class waded through the book, he really didn't study much because he had already read the book. When he applied to graduate school, he selected the university (Columbia) because he recognized the professor's name from books that he had already read and reread; he was a heavy library user and was very well-read in the subjects that he was interested in.
It reminded me that I often do not read the things that I should be reading to really gain knowledge in one area; it reminded me to turn off the TV and read those things. Reading this book also makes me think of people who inspire me because of how much they accomplish...someone like Tom Johnson. Rather than feel competitive with someone like Tom (and feel inferior because you don't produce as many blog posts or as high of quality with your posts), it is better to just be inspired by Tom, inspired to know that someone is out there doing so much in the same 24 hours that I have with my day.
Plus, people like Tom are just so interesting; they know so much that they are the type of person you just want to sit in the corner with at a party and pick their brain. The book talks about Buffett talking stocks at frat parties in college and how people really enjoyed listening to him talk about it at these parties. He knew/knows so much about the stock market that it's inspiring.

My other favorite book this year is The Logic of Life. This book is a Freakonomics-like book, so it attempts to explain human behavior from an economist's perspective...just really interesting stuff in the same vein that Freakonomics is interesting.

After reading so many textbook pages this year, it's just fun to delve into books like Logic of Life and Snowball and get lost in them.

Also, I was at the mall today and stopped by T-Mobile to try out their new Google Android G1 phone. I liked it. I could see myself enjoying it if I were a T-Mobile customer. I thought it's probably a little inferior to the iPhone but definitely a close option. It will be interesting to see what the BlackBerry Storm looks like when it comes out later this month.
I watched history last week along with everyone else: Obama got elected.

Random updates, reading lately list, and pix messages

2008-10-11T13:25:00.001-07:00

One thing that I do lately that is helpful is to take pictures of books that I want to read at some point. I take out my phone, which has a camera built in, and then snap a pic of it. Then I send a picture text message to my Flickr account so that if I'm ever in the library in the future or in a bookstore and want to recall what I want to read, I just pull up my photos on my phone or visit my Flickr page.
http://www.flickr.com/photos/hhansenseattle/

I also take pictures of books that I think that my friends might like--they then can visit my Flickr page and see them. Newspaper or magazine articles that you want to remember are also an option.

Reading lately

Fundamentals of Financial Management - textbook for Finance (if you don't understand where your money goes when you send money to your mutual fund company, I recommend chapter 5)
Management Accounting - textbook for Controllership (one of the authors of this book is Kaplan, who co-founded the Balanced Scorecard, also, if you've never heard of controlling costs using activity-based costing or time-based costing, read a few chapters in this book to start to understand it--also, this is one of the more readable textbooks that I've ever read...it reads like a regular book; the editor of this book should definitely be congratulated because he or she probably pushed them in that direction. Editors are so underrated as essential contributors to projects.)
Mastering the Management System - HBR article
"The Strategic Implications of Technology on Job Loss," Academy of Strategic Management Journal, Volume 6, 2007
"Edwards Deming, Mary P. Follett and Frederick W. Taylor: Reconciliation of Differences in Organizational and Strategic Leadership," Academy of Strategic Management Journal, Volume 6, 2007
"Linking Strategy to Operations: Balanced scorecard and activity-based costing co-creator shares insights on evolution of management accounting tools." Journal of Accountancy,
http://www.aicpa.org/pubs/jofa/oct2008/kaplan.htm
The Logic of Life

Random updates

My job is about to change--more about that later.
I am behind on reading Tom's blog and all other blogs--nothing new there. The reason is because of quiz prep all last weekend, as well as writing two 4-page papers for my other class.
Ping pong is an excellent way for various work teams to improve relations.
I attended a craft show this morning. I love to go to craft shows, in part because the gifts I buy are thoughtful and look homemade, but I didn't have to spend hours making it. Plus it reminds me of how neighbor houses and my relatives' houses looked in my childhood days. And I appreciate other people's handiwork, which is similar to how I enjoy Other People's Kids or Other People's Pets but am glad to give them back at the end of the day.

Seattle job scene for technical writers

2008-09-22T18:19:00.000-07:00

What is it like to work in the Seattle area? This post will attempt to answer that question, but I also just finished reading the Salary Database information on http://www.stc.org/ and also the excellent article about employment in the Sept/Oct 2008 issue of Intercom (Feast or Famine: U.S. Technical Writer Employment, 2007 By: Richard O'Sullivan, STC Consulting Economist, http://www.stc.org/intercom/), so I recommend that if you don't have an STC membership, you should get one or find someone who has one so that you can read these resources. Both will be very valuable to newbies or veterans in salary discussions or just to give you a heads-up.
http://www.stc.org/stcmembers/salaryDatabase01.asp

There is also salary survey data that you can read at www.writersua.com.

I'm no expert, but I've lived here about 7 years, so here is some advice. You might want to hook up with one of the big three companies that specialize in placing technical communicators on non-permanent technical writing assignments:

http://www.sakson.com/
http://www.writestuff.com/
Volt: http://www.jobs.volt.com/JobSearch/Jobs.cfm

Sakson, The Write Stuff, and Volt are great for those who are new to town and need work quickly; Sakson especially is known to pay quite well. The agencies are also great for helping you get your foot in the door with Microsoft or other name-brand companies in the Seattle area.

If you need a full-time, permanent job, the best advice is to look at the Seattle Times newspaper for a job, go to a Puget Sound STC chapter monthly meeting, or look at the Puget Sound business journal to figure out which companies employ technical workers in the Seattle area.
http://seattle.bizjournals.com/seattle/
http://marketplace.nwsource.com/jobs/
http:://stc-psc.org

Obviously, those with software skills are likely to have the most opportunities here. But we also have lots of jobs in a variety of industries:

Boeing
medical-related jobs at numerous hospitals
medical device manufacturers, such as Medtronics
Google Kirkland
Google Seattle
Adobe
RealNetworks
Microsoft
lots of software start-ups
many more...

Probably the smartest thing to do is to use www.seattletimes.com, click Jobs, and then conduct searches to see which companies hire for various tech-related jobs. Then write down the names of those companies and visit each company's website and click their Jobs page to see what they are looking for. When I first moved here, I posted my resume on www.Monster.com and then someone at a company that places technical writers at work sites contacted me, and then I began working for that company about two weeks after I moved here. I don't work for that company anymore, but it was a great fit at that time.

Obviously, don't forget www.LinkedIn.com and your other networking affiliations. Don't forget that job boards at technical communication-related conferences are also great resources for you (STC Summit, WritersUA conference, DocTrain, and numerous regional conferences that STC chapters put on). Local STC chapters often have job listings on their websites, too.

Also, if you have usability skills, your employment opportunities are even better in the Pacific Northwest because you have that many more jobs that you can search for. If you need to get a certificate or degree to beef up your resume in these areas, the UW is the most-respected and highest profile name in the area to do that:

http://www.uwtc.washington.edu/

Puget Sound STC is having a non-Competition this month (so get your Help peer reviewed and join in the Seattle technical writing community)

2008-09-04T21:21:00.000-07:00

Just finished recording a podcast with Tom and Charles Jeter. It was very fun. You can volunteer with Tom's podcast, too--just ask him how you can get involved.

The Puget Sound chapter is back in gear after a summer break. Looks as though they are having a non-Competition this year, calling it a Peer Review, which sounds great. They lowered the price and just seem to want involvement, so get involved (either as a submitter or judge)! For more information, see http://stc-psc.org/.

I have been busy with vacation to So. Dakota to see family lately, so that explains the lack of blogging (and was ill last week). Recording podcasts with Tom and Charles is a kick, though, so I'm re-energized to post about the Seattle tech comm scene this weekend, and then post some other things, too. We mostly covered WriterRiver.com topics, so check that out over a lunch break once or twice a week to keep up with trends (and contribute to it--takes only 2 clicks Tom said, and it's meant to be social).

I mentioned Howcast.com on the podcast, which is a site for "How to" videos (or for text-only "Wiki Guide" contributions if video might be overkill for your topic, such as for a recipe). I also mentioned that Ginny Redish has information about PDFs in her book, Letting Go of the Words, so check that book out if you want to read some Best Practices around PDFs.

Thoughts on DITA XML authoring and Ginny Redish

2008-08-05T12:21:00.000-07:00

So I did a tweet the other day about a future post about Tech Writing scene in Seattle, Dita/XML authoring in general, tech to learn to stay cutting edge, and know thyself to be sme. I'll cover all but the Seattle TW scene in this post. I hope to do the Seattle scene post later this week.

My thoughts on DITA/XML authoring
Great, great, great articles in Intercom's April 2008 issue about DITA. I rode the bus last week and got through all of them. The Doyle, O'Keefe, and Perlin articles were my favorite, but all of them were good. In previous jobs, I have authored in XML using a Notepad-liked editor and using structured FrameMaker. In my mind, writing with the constraints of structure is just as freeing as it is limiting.

It frees you because you are only allowed a few choices (read The Paradox of Choice book) and helps you be more brief and conform to your other writers on the team. It is limiting because you have to not insert notes or paragraphs when you are not allowed by the XML rules. Because a writer usually can select the view that they like (tags showing or hidden, and so on), or the environment can be set up so that a writer does not even need to know that they are authoring in XML, I think that the transition to writing in XML is quicker than most writers think it will be.

I also like how the authors of the Intercom articles did so much name-dropping of tools. Lots of options and a great way to keep up with trends in the XML world, even if you don't use DITA.

My thoughts on tech to learn to stay cutting edge
The DITA articles had some open-source options or free trial versions that you can try out, or do some authoring in XML using tutorials and other tools freely available on the Web. XML, screen recording software (Camtasia or Captivate), Flare, RoboHelp, SnagIt, and other tool names that Tom mentions on his blog.

Know thyself to be SME
If you stay at an organization long enough, you are bound to become a subject matter expert in your product. The reason I say "know thyself" is because you should pick a company or organization whose products suit you. You should want to be there and enjoy learning it.

Other Intercom/Tech Comm goodies
Also due to the bus rides, here are a few other observations about Intercom and the Technical Communication journal.
I was sorry to see that George Hayhoe is leaving his editor position of Technical Communication. I really like that journal, so I hope that the next person is just as good.

I was reading the book review for The User is Always Right (by Steve Mulder), and the book review is written by Ginny Redish. The book review is a treat to read; her writing skills make that book review stand out high, high, high above the crowd. She also contrasts the book with The Persona Lifecycle, which is another treat. Redish is one of those people I'm so thrilled to be able to claim as a guru in our very own techncial communication field.

My favorite article in the March 2008 issue of Intercom is Karina Stokes's article about grant writing. She does a great job of letting you know what it's like and how to do it well. I especially think that those who are near retirement might like to look into grant writing as a tough mental exercise (keep exercising the mental muscle) and a way to do a lot of good through existing skills.

New look for my blog

2008-07-26T13:38:00.000-07:00

I updated the look of my blog, so if you read my blog through an RSS feed, check it out at heidilhansen.blogspot.com. I was never very happy with the large green stuff at the top after my update last year, so I eliminated that. During the template change, the Tag Cloud was the only thing that I had to redo, so it went quickly. Paving the way to post more the rest of this year.

How I write Help for a topic-based help system

2008-07-26T11:24:00.000-07:00

In reading Tom's blog, it's easy to see that newbies are out there, so here is a post about how I write topic-based Help for a software application. I have 10 years of experience in the field, so hopefully it helps someone.
While the user experience (UX) side of me does not like to think of the features as "features" because we should be thinking more in terms of goals, tasks, and providing answers to the questions we anticipate will be asked, inevitably I think in terms of both features, goals, and answers (all day, every day, I try and add morsels of verbiage that will answer someone's question that I think they'll have).
Here are 5 insights into how I write:

Create a documentation plan. Write a "What's New" blurb as one of your first things that you do and explain the advantages of the feature. Also, even if you don't have a glossary, see if any words need to be defined, define them, and refine that verbiage with a quick peer edit. The What's New and glossary verbiage can both be reused in your dialog boxes overviews and concepts, which is handy. Also, if your tech reviewer signs off on the documentation plan, all that's left to do is execute that plan, saving you and the tech reviewer time later.
Think Topics, and think BRIEF. A procedure, a dialog box overview (context-sensitive, press F1 from the dialog box), and a concept. Sometimes less. Sometimes a bit more, especially on the procedure side. If a feature is quite complicated (rare), I'll tie the procedures together into a process topic, to provide a launching place and show the order in which to do the procedures. Sometimes more than one concept is needed, but usually if I'm going over one concept, the other concept is just examples, and I put "examples" in the topic title. If you write for a Web app, all of this might be overkill; you might only need a FAQ page, some pop-up field explanations, and a searchable forum of user-generated content that you add to. For my needs (.chm output for a client app), I have numerous topics, but for your needs, you might need much, much less.
Do both: read the requirements document and play with the feature. I always find things when I play with the software that I think would be helpful that aren't in the requirements document. I always read the requirements line by line because I always notice things upon a closer reading that will be helpful for my persona(s) to know. I also review the requirements document early and sit in on the requirements review meetings and ask questions to ensure that the final requirements document covers questions that I think I'll have when I start to write; I don't bug the developers, no need to do that. Then, one pass of the draft by the tech reviewer is all it takes to complete the topics (and then a few passes by the editor and it's ready for localization).
Short sentences. Short topics. Use a style guide. After reading Letting Go of the Words, I now try to make my sentences max out around 26 words. Also after reading that book, I now believe that 1-sentence paragraphs are OK, think White Space. Also, for procedures, I think that a 1-sentence introduction above the steps should be the maximum every time (or at least the goal) because the extra verbiage can be in a concept. Also, if my dialog box overviews have more than 3 paragraphs before I explain the tabs and fields in tables, I think that's getting a little long. Again, the extra verbiage should be in the concept, not in the dialog box overview. For word choices, I use MSTP in addition to the required style guide for the client application.

Also, if my dialog box overview doesn't link to a task, it's a clue that something might be wrong; my goal is not to document the software, my goal is to get Ms Persona to her task ASAP. The tasks (procedures) are on the Table of Contents (TOC) along with the concepts; the dialog box overviews are not on the TOC, but if they are in your case, it's gravy. In some Help systems, I've seen that the dialog box overview IS the concept, which seems fine in my mind, too. A hybrid topic that combines a concept and procedure is also acceptable if the entire feature can be summed up in those two topics or if the steps are very short.
Provide user interface Help. Help makes it so intuitive that going to the Help isn't necessary. What if you could write all error message text, field labels, status bar text, tab labels, mouse-over tooltips, link text, and so on? You can and should. Try to provide help on the screen before Mr Persona ever reaches your Help topic. Ask critical questions during the requirements review and speak up about an interaction design change if you think one is necessary. It's been said a million times, if it's going to be hard for you to write and explain, it probably has a poor design and needs to be redone.

So this post contains the details about writing. I also have a Day In The Life Of A Technical Writer post that I wrote a while back that gives you the bigger picture. Tom also has numerous posts about this, and here is one about what the job of Technical Writer is like.

In summary, don't take what I do and do it exactly. Ask your readers what they want and give them more of that (which Tom also mentioned in his Workload post).

Friendfeed and other Web 2.0 news

2008-07-25T07:50:00.000-07:00

I've been using my phone to read Google Reader. I read all of Tom's Google Reader Shared items, Brier Dudley's posts, ReadWriteWeb, ProgrammableWeb, an aggregate of all MSDN feeds, and a few others.

Lately I've been noticing that Friendfeed has been popping up a lot, so I need to check that out. I also should check out The Content Wrangler Ning community because I really liked Tom's podcast a couple months ago about that with Scott Abel.

I'll also been noticing that this is a great time for developers to start making money on their apps through the use of freely available APIs. The iPhone app store, which is like an iTunes except for apps that make your iPhone more useful, is a prime example. There are just so many interesting APIs lately on programmableweb.com.

It makes you want to learn this stuff, enter programming writing as a career, sell some apps as a side business, or just generally be part of the wave in some fashion. Really exciting stuff lately. It doesn't make me regret my ongoing accounting degree, but this is definitely a fun time to be in high tech.

My Story of Taking Online Courses versus Classroom courses

2008-07-16T07:14:00.000-07:00

I can finally post after completing a quiz and mid-term exam in my accounting course. I also have other things that I do, so blogging unfortunately takes a backseat. I did have time this morning (although I should probably be out for a walk right now) to talk about my experience taking online courses versus classroom-based courses.

From 2003-2004, I took four courses at Amberton university, which offers online MBA courses (they also offer them in person if you happen to live near Garland, Texas). This past week, I heard on NPR when I was driving home that more and more college students are opting to take online courses instead of classroom-based courses, largely because of high gas prices. I thought to myself that I was a good candidate to write a quick blog post about my experience because I have attended both in-person and eLearning courses within the past 5 years. Here is my experience:

Classroom-based education is better by far. Part of that superiority might be because the classes that I took at Amberton had such low technology: no video of lectures, no video animations of concepts that we were learning in the book, no audo MP3 files of lectures, and textbooks that did not have supporting materials such as quizzes and term-matching interactive exercises. I had one class that did a Live Chat with the professor and fellow students, but it didn't have audio and was just us typing, like in an IM session.

Amberton may have changed, and I still appreciate how affordable their prices were, but I was basically reading the textbook and taking open-book exams and quizzes for my grade, basically teaching myself.
In the three courses that I've taken so far this year that are classroom-based, I have noticed that off-the-cuff comments by professors are what makes a class great. Anecdotes bring the message home, and professors also have a good pulse of current trends, so they relate your course material to news; these tidbits help drive home the material. Also, engaging in a Socratic dialogue or any other kind of in-depth learning is hard to do when there are pauses because the technoloy is either slow (video feeds), asynchronous (watch a video on your own time without your classmates), or cumbersome (technical difficulties, and so on).

Also, when you learn by basically teaching yourself, it's easier for the material to escape you. When you go to class and hear a lecture, you learn one method; when you read at home, you soak it in some more; when you prepare for a closed-book exam, you learn it again; when you do the homework problems, you learn it yet again. With online courses, you remove some of those additional ways for the material to sink in, and therefore will likely not retain as much later when you might need it.
The Fun Factor. It's just not as much fun to work at home alone. Even if there were Facebook-like profiles of your classmates, you'd have to take the time to read all of those (and forget them). It's so much faster and fun to show up in a classroom, see others, see how they behave in class, and just generally engage with people face-to-face.

So if you can cut corners in other areas of your life (eating out, clothes that a "must-have" just becuase it's on Sale and SUCH a GREAT DEAL), I would cut out something else so that I could still afford the gas to drive to a physical location to attend my college classes. If that's not possible, then online learning is obviously still better than no learning (eLearning vs. vegging in front of TV, hmmm, eLearning wins).

In other news, I need to catch up on Tom's blogs (I think that I'm a few behind), and I need to catch up with WriterRiver content. But I also need to read chapter 9--ahhh, so many things to do and not enough time. My goal is to take the CPA exam in 2010 or 2011, and, no, I'm not taking the CPA exam simply because the field of Technical Communication does not offer any certification; I'm doing it because I enjoy Finance and Business in general. I enjoy TC and computer science a lot, too, but my core competencies are detail-oriention and communication, so it all fits.

Last weekend I had to ignore that it was 85 and gorgious out, so this weekend I hope to enjoy the outdoors a lot more.

Audio of 5 books that I read is online

2008-06-23T17:11:00.000-07:00

I actually did something other than read an accounting textbook one Saturday morning, so you can check out the 15-minute MP3 at your leisure. Tom published my MP3 (thanks, Tom!) that I made and posted it to the TechWriterVoices podcast; the audio is basically a 15-minute book report about five books related to technical communication.
http://www.idratherbewriting.com/2008/06/16/podcast-five-books-to-add-to-your-technical-communication-library/

Reluctant to start a blog? Don't be

2008-06-13T07:55:00.000-07:00

This morning is a perfect example of why you should start a blog if you don't have one yet. I looked at the Puget Sound (Seattle) SIGCHI (usability professional association) Web site to see when their next meeting was, and this is all that I found:

Next Meeting
Thur, June 26
6-8 pm
Dennis Wixon
Location TBD
(source: http://pssigchi.acm.org/html/index.html)

Yikes, right, because there was no link to more information, so how am I supposed to know whether to attend based on a simple name; however, Dennis Wixon's name is familiar to me, so I knew that I had heard him speak before. Then, I searched my blog for the name Wixon and saw what I had written about him before:

November 8, 2007 Microsoft is hosting a one-day UX conference as part of the World Usability Day, Dennis Wixon - Research Manager, MS Games, will present
Microsoft usability folks (Dennis Wixon, Michael Medlock, and Melissa Federoff) presented on the RITE method. They encourage reading the 2nd edition of the book Cost Justifying Usability by Randolph G. Bias and Deborah J. Mayhew (it discusses the RITE, Rapid Iterative Testing and Evaluation, method in a chapter or two--the 2nd edition will be available in March 2005).

Quick excerpt from my Oct 2004 post about Wixon's presentation: If you ever have a chance to hear Dennis Wixon speak, RUN, DON'T WALK to attend. WOW! He's so well-read that it will blow you away. He seems to have the rare gift of being both incredibly well-read and having a hunger to apply the reading to his business life (which right now happens to be at Microsoft in the Games area).

When you go to your boss, as a usability professional, you should be proud if you can say “We found 1000 problems and fixed 900,“ rather than most of us currently leaning toward being proud that we say this “We found 1000 problems--gee, aren't we awesome at finding problems.“ One focuses on rapidly fixing the problems and one focuses on the constant complainer who doesn't do anything, which is similar to the person who finds 1000 problems but has such a slow process for fixing them (1-month cycle for fixing things rather than 1-day cycle for fixing things).

Wixon seemed to be saying that way too many people in the usability field have such a poor process that, even if they are able to uncover 1000 problems rapidly (which even that is questionable), they aren't co-existing with their developers or PMs to the point where they can make 900 fixes rather than 100 fixes (most people have a s-l-o-w process in place that it takes 2 weeks to fix things that, given a better process, could take 1 day).

So, given my high past praise for Wixon (an Internet search can turn up others' opinions but not your opinion unless you post things), it quickly became obvious to me this morning that the June 2008 presentation of his was something that I wanted to attend. However, I then remembered that I have another commitment that night, so I'll have to check out the DVD from the SIGCHI library after re-joining SIGCHI in the fall (they take a July-August summer break from monthly meetings).

But this example is neat because it shows how quickly you can recall whether you've heard a speaker and what you thought of that speaker.

On another note: Yesterday was an example of the beauty of the TechWriterVoices podcast: I knew that I'd be flying and would be dropped off at the airport early, so I loaded up about 8 podcasts (all of the ones that I needed to listen to in order to catch up and be current) and listened to them one after the other. This made my time watching Euro 2008 soccer and US Open golf much more productive and enjoyable for me (I learned a TON). So thanks, Tom. This is funny: I went to go type the link for that TechWriterVoices link above and started to type in 'idratherbetalking' because I was thinking about the podcast. On a side note, I also loaded up my other three favorites: PRI Marketplace, PRI This American Life, and BusinessWeek cover stories.

Random Update

2008-06-11T10:27:00.000-07:00

Random updates:

So I had wanted to record a couple of podcasts while on vacation, but now I think it will probably only be one because I never got around to purchasing a portable recorder and couldn't find my PC mic before I left. Hopefully this Sunday, I'll be able to eek out some time to record one to submit to Tom (and find my mic). It's also about time for me to hit the Intercom and Tech Comm articles to post about my favorites of those (and observations about what I think of them and how they apply to my latest TC thoughts), so perhaps I can get to that within the next week, too. I've spent time on vacation reading Tom's latest posts (including neat insights about the STC Summit and his Marketing post and Sharepoint posts that I really enjoyed) and am about to finish catching up on his podcasts.
I think Tom's latest creation, www.WriterRiver.com, is going to be a hit. Great job, Tom. I found out about it on Twitter yesterday afternoon, so receiving that text message was fun (and his marketing-savvy/funny "Almost ready to launch...watch your Twitter for that announcement tomorrow" type of tweet on Monday).
Accounting master's degree is going well. I just finished two classes (Database Accounting Systems and Tax) and am about to start my third next week. I hope to pass the CPA exam in 2011. I love User Assistance but could also see myself in other positions; my current job relates to accounting software.
Vacation has been great: old friends with lots of laughs, lunch outside today watching an ant move some food from one destination to another, sun, sun, sun, heat, amazing heat for once this spring, and great food with family

Web 2.0 applications for technical communicators: notes from Scott Boggan May Seattle STC meeting

2008-05-23T12:31:00.000-07:00

I attended the Scott Boggan Web 2.0 presentation last night. I'll get to the notes below, but first I wanted to express why I like professional societies (as a compliment to technical communication bloggers and commercial conference providers):

Job board. If someone you know outside of the field needs a technical communicator's services, it's very fast to send them to your local chapter's Web site and tell them to get their contract need posted to the Jobs page. It took you all of 10 seconds to point them there.
Convenient mailing lists. Local chapters have eyeballs and mailing lists. See #1 about eyeballs on the Job boards. Mailing lists (email or snail mail) are, again, convenient for outsiders to tap into.
Monthly meetings. Meetings that you can count on that recur monthly. These meetings are a quick way to keep up with trends, listen to experts who have taken the time to do more thinking about things than you, interact with professors (get an academic-industry mix going on), socialize, listen to Q & A without microphone hassles like can often happen on podcasts, and keep up with trends if you have temporarily fallen behind on Tom's podcasts and the TC community's blog posts.
A voice in gov't and mainstream media. Advocacy/lobbying on your behalf in D.C. or in the mainstream media, and so on.
Professional journals (Technical Communication, for example). Articles that present academic research and that are vetted by peers. To me, this is why I send in my dues every year; I value having a respected place for TC researchers to publish, and I cast my vote for this continuance with my dues dollars each year.

Now, on to my notes from last night. Incidentally, my plan is to catch up on all of Tom's DocTrain podcasts this weekend and then probably post again with a synthesis of these notes below with my thoughts on those podcasts.

STC-PSC May Monthly chapter meeting (http://www.stc-psc.org/)
Scott Boggan, May 22, 2008, Silver Cloud Hotel Stadium in Seattle; Scott Boggan bio is at the event description
He started off with a definition of Web 2.0 and Ajax.

Ajax. Current ways that Ajax is applied currently: auto-complete in a Search box, e.g., how Yahoo! is doing their search box currently; streaming pop-ups, e.g., how Netflix does their movie descriptions when you hover over a movie title; annotations - allow users to annotate pictures with sentences about the pictures or with tags, e.g., Flickr photos. Some downsides to Ajax: breaks the "Back" button in the browser and can make bookmarking difficult (same as frames).

[my thought and my friends' thoughts that we've had related to annotations: what if users could go beyond adding a single tag/keyword to their topic and instead could append their own customizations to the Help below the "official" procedure that the UA person wrote? In other words, the "official" procedural steps always stay but the user can click something like an "Add a comment" link but instead of adding a comment that is published to the world, they copy and paste the official steps and then modify those steps to suit their own environment. They then click Submit and then only their company can see those 'custom' steps, but then the custom steps are what they follow and the 'official' steps are just there for reference above or below "their" steps.]
RSS. One way to apply RSS to Help is to give users an RSS feed to your topics, so that they can subscribe to new topics or subscribe to updated topics.
Offline content viewers. Offline content viewers e.g., Google Gears, Adobe Air, and Microsoft Silverlight. This allows you to move from a client-based Help system (CHM files) to a Web server without the complication of wondering how users will access the Help if they don't have an Internet connection (if on an airplane or otherwise offline). Before they move offline, they can click a button to download the Help (or a subsection of the Help) to their PC and then disconnect and still have access to the Help. Tools vendors will likely integrate offline viewers (Adobe Air or something like it) into newer versions of their products.
Folksonomies, Taxonomies, and Tag Clouds. Folksonomies are when users add the tags to Web pages; Taxonomies are when professionals (such as information designers) add the tags. What if users could add tags to Help topics and then see a tag cloud? Their own personal tag cloud? Or a tag cloud of everyone's cumulative effort? This might not be helpful, but perhaps it could be. Perhaps a reading of Gerry McGovern's Customer Care Words with an eye toward tag clouds would be a good (Note: an audience member suggested the customer care words content, not Scott).
Recommendation Systems. Recommendation systems have applications to tech comm. Dr. Farkas (UW tech comm professor) made a comment related to recommendation systems, saying something along these lines: I think that the holy grail of technical communication is tracking user activity, noticing their failures from that data, and then presenting Help that responds to that. Going further, perhaps you monitor a crowd to detect a multiple failures and adjust your Help accordingly.

Similarly, what if we aggregate the favorite topics of users and let users experience the best four topics related to the same failure that keeps coming up (combining the monitoring theme of recommendation systems with the rating of Help topics that hundreds of users have done).
What if recommendation systems could be used to filter your Table of Contents (TOC) or filter your Search results? What if users told you who they were so that you can get profiles of your users and then track application use or Help system use by profile. You might also ask users to rate themselves as far as their expertise (combine rating systems and recommendation systems).
User-generated content (wikis, and so on). If users can create their own content (wikis, forum posts, etc), a technical communicator's job is to integrate those different locations of content, to make it consistent, coherent; "we direct users down the long tail" as Scott said. Also, Bots on wikipedia poll for vandalism, so that is a way to try to keep wiki content of decent quality. "Search on Wikis is usually terrible"...and you can't do sophisticated queries (more Scott comments).

There are many examples of wikis that serve as user assistance/Help topics, and Ruby on Rails is one example--it has a wiki of UA topics, which they call "HowTos", and a neat thing that they encourage is that if you are a user and want information that you're not seeing, you can simply create the title only of a topic and then someone else in the community now has the cue to come along and write the content for that title that you are hoping to see.

While opening yourself up to user-generated content might not work for all products due to liability concerns, a good disclaimer can help, but also it's often worth opening yourself up to user-generated content because it's a great way to get edge scenarios out there--often technical writers only have time to create one path to perform a procedure, so opening up the Help for others to write edge scenarios could add a lot to your Help.

Other possible trend: Google and Flickr seem to predominantly offer FAQs and forums (forum is user-generated Help), so their scaling back is a possible trend.
Conclusion. Scott sees these trends: RSS moves into the mainstream because it's still only used by a minority of Web users; Discussion forums on the increase; Wikis for open source projects (open source code and tools) will continue to thrive.

Out with the old way of Help and in with the new: Old was client-based, New is server-based (Web); static content (old) vs. Interactive experiences (new); Updated infrequently (old) vs. Frequently updated (new); Pull (old) vs. Push (new).

Highly recommends the Web 2.0 article that Tim O'Reilly has available on the Web: http://tinyurl.com/743r5. He also recommends reading The Long Tail, The Wisdom of Crowds, and the www.web20workgroup.com Web site. These slides might become available, too.

So those are my notes. As I said above, I'll also try to listen to Tom's podcasts and post a few more Web 2.0 things soon.

On a different note, the WSJ had a neat Flash example on their site this morning related to summer books of possible interest (free to visit this link):
http://s.wsj.net/public/resources/documents/info-flash08.html?project=SUMMERBOOKS08
The Garden of Last Days
Beijing Coma
Finding Nouf
Pharmakon

Also, the Seattle International Film Festival started yesterday. Their Web site uses Ajax, so you might be interested in both the films and the site design itself.

Easy way to keep up on technical writing trends: attend a local chapter meeting about Ajax, RSS, and other Web 2.0 technologies

2008-05-19T09:08:00.000-07:00

I plan to attend this STC meeting later this week (description below as seen on www.stc-psc.org):

Web 2.0 Technologies with Scott Boggan
This meeting examines popular "Web 2.0" technologies and their
broad potential for providing richer and more collaborative web-based user
assistance. We'll assess the current and future impact of information delivery
technologies--such as AJAX, RSS, and recommendation systems--and describe how
each can provide greater levels of interactivity for users and between
systems.
We'll look at collaborative technologies such as folksonomies, tag
clouds, wikis, and community forums, and consider their impact on us as authors.
You will also learn:
The basics of how each technology works.Examples of how
each is being utilized on the web. How AJAX, RSS, and recommendation systems
might change the way users retrieve and interact with user assistance. How
collaborative technologies will change the dynamics of user assistance content
development.
Presenter(s): Scott BogganScott Boggan manages the user
interface design for Isilon Systems, the leader in clustered storage systems and
software. With nearly 20 years experience, Scott is an acknowledged expert in
online and print documentation as well as a popular speaker. A co-author of the
popular book Developing Online Help for Windows, he has taught at the University
of Washington and was a charter member of the Microsoft Help MVP
program.
Date May 22, 2008 Topic Web 2.0 Technologies with Scott Boggan
Presenter(s) Scott Boggan Time 6:00-6:45 PM: Networking and Buffet 6:45-8:00 PM:
Presentation
Location - Silver Cloud Hotel - Stadium, Seattle, Washington
Cost: Member cost: $10, Student cost: $5, Non Member cost: $15
After the deadline the cost increases by $5

Is Technical Communication being threatened by the new Office Community Clips site?

2008-04-28T08:51:00.000-07:00

Interesting CNET.com article today announces that Microsoft Office now has a tool that you can download to search within the ribbon for commands, and the article also announces a "YouTube for Help videos" about Office:

On Monday, Microsoft is going public with two of the group's projects--search commands and "Community Clips," which is basically an attempt to create a YouTube for help videos.

CNET article: http://www.news.com/8301-13860_3-9929280-56.html?tag=nefd.lede
Search commands: http://www.officelabs.com/projects/searchcommands/Pages/default.aspx
Community Clips: http://www.officelabs.com/projects/communityclips/Pages/Default.aspx

While your first, gut reaction to the YouTube site for How To videos might be that you feel as though this spells the end for technical writing, think again. To me (and I've said this on a podcast last year with Tom), people want Help information in a variety of flavors. One flavor is video and another flavor is a Help topic. When I want something very quickly, a search of the Offline Help is fastest; it's my favorite flavor for that circumstance.

Other times, when I have more time, I might enjoy a Community Clip video. Also, I might like the Offline Help option better because it is more authoritative.

Rather than feel threatened, I think that technical communicators should welcome these new items, especially if they can turn up seemlessly in a Help Experience search result. The Help Center can quickly become something that is seen as a hub for finding a lot of useful items, a place for selecting your favorite flavor.

Todd Wilkens of Adaptive Path presented at SIGCHI

2008-04-16T07:51:00.000-07:00

I missed the SIGCHI meeting this past Monday due to a conflict, but here is the abstract that Puget Sound SIGCHI sent out about the meeting beforehand:

Todd Wilkens, a design researcher for Adaptive Path, is featured at a special meeting of the Puget Sound SIGCHI Monday, April 14, at the Bellevue Regional Library; Networking at 6 pm; presentation at 7 pm.

No registration is required for this free meeting of UX professionals. Topic: Todd will talk about how successful businesses can-and should-use customer experiences to inform and shape the product development process, from start to finish. He will be drawing on material covered in his just released book, “Subject to Change: Creating Great Products and Services for an Uncertain World.” To achieve success in today's ever-changing and unpredictable markets, competitive businesses need to rethink and reframe their strategies across the board. Instead of approaching new product development from the inside out, companies have to begin by looking at the process from the outside in, beginning with the customer experience. It's a new way of
thinking-and working-that can transform companies struggling to adapt to today's environment into innovative, agile, and commercially successful organizations. Companies must develop a new set of organizational competencies: qualitative customer research to better understand customer behaviors and motivations; an open design process to reframe possibilities and translate new ideas into great
customer experiences; and agile technological implementation to quickly prototype ideas, getting them from the whiteboard out into the world where people can respond to them.

Bio:Todd Wilkens is a design researcher for Adaptive Path. Thanks to over a decade of experience in research and design, Todd holds a passionate belief that by truly understanding people, we can create compelling product and service experiences as well as real value. Todd's research experience ranges from online communities to digital video to youth, religion, and culture. He has worked on research, strategy, and design projects for a diverse group of clients including large multi-channel media organizations to Internet start-ups. He is adept at working with people from different backgrounds to synthesize product, business, technology, and user needs into
cohesive strategies and designs.

With academic training in sociology, information science, and computer science, he is also well versed in social science theory and a wide-ranging toolkit of research methods from ethnography and interviewing to statistical analysis and eye-tracking. Todd publishes and speaks regularly on design research and human-centered design generally. He also teaches courses and workshops in design research, interaction design, information architecture, and sociology at professional events as well as at several universities and colleges.

I plan to definitely try to attend the next SIGCHI meeting. For this meeting that I missed, I plan to check out the DVD of the event. In other news, yesterday marked the first time that Tax Day came and it was actually of note to me (because I'm in a class with that subject material). I've noticed that the best things about taking classes in a classroom are the random comments that the instructor makes or that the classmates make. They make accounting interesting just by talking about their CPA exam experience, their experience doing tax returns for clients, and so on. The course material/program becomes much more engaging with the side conversations.

Also of note is this headline this morning: VA in midst of huge project to rewrite regulations in plain language, with the full article text at
http://www.govexec.com/story_page.cfm?articleid=39785&dcn=e_gvet

Ginny Redish to speak in Seattle next Tuesday, links to UX Track at Mix08, and more

2008-04-03T07:08:00.000-07:00

Ginny Redish is a big guru in the technical communication/information architecture/usability realm, so if you can make it to her presentation next Tuesday in Seattle, you'll learn a lot. More information is posted on the Puget Sound STC chapter site, but the info from their site is also quoted below with a link to go see her pic and RSVP:

A special STC evening with Ginny Redish: Letting Go of the Words - Writing Web Content That Works
Tuesday, April 8, 2008-6pm Silver Cloud Hotel – Stadium, Seattle, Washington(between Safeco Field and Qwest Field)
Each use of your Web site is a conversation started by a busy site visitor. How well does your Web site converse with the people who come to it? Come spend the evening with Ginny Redish and see many examples of Web sites that both do and do not hold good conversations with their site visitors. We'll look especially at the content in navigation and search since getting people
efficiently to the information that they want is important. We'll spend
most of our time on the destination pages, the content that people come to your Web site to get. As always with Ginny, the evening will be interactive and fun. You'll go home with great practical guidelines for
organizing, writing, and designing Web pages, as well as familiarity with the research behind the guidelines.
http://stc-psc.org/upcoming-events/stcevent.2008-03-19.1195466182

I probably won't attend because I have my first exam that week, so hopefully someone will post notes online so that I can see what I missed. I don't think anyone has recording equipment in the chapter to record it and then submit an MP3 to TechWriterVoices. Redish has a new book out (pic above), so I bet if I read the book, I can get her message: Letting Go of the Words: Writing Web Content that Works.

Also noteworthy, at the WritersUA conference, one of my favorite presenters mentioned the Vista UX Guidelines. Be sure to read most guidelines even if you aren't involved in shaping the user experience (UX) because there is a topic specifically about Help topics.

Session materials from the WritersUA conference are online: http://www.writersua.com/ohc/suppmatl.htm

Mix08 slides are also online; to view a presentation about "The Story of the Ribbon" that a Microsoft UX professional did, click the UX Track link and then navigate to the last one. This site also is an example of what Silverlight looks like, if you're interested in Silverlight: http://sessions.visitmix.com/ As an aside, there are a lot of open UX jobs here in the Seattle area. You should also consider the UW Technical Communication master's degree if you want to further your career in usability, or their User-centered design (UCD) certificate (I just got a Twitter tweet this morning from Tom saying that he posted about transitioning your career from tech communication to usability, so I thought I'd add to that conversation).

Also from WritersUA, I really liked the API presentation that Ed Marshall did. One of the highlights of that presentation was that he mentioned his favorite DIF tool, a tool used to compare two ASCII or Binary files and highlight the differences between them. Beyond Compare ($30) was the name of his favorite (http://www.scootersoftware.com/), and he also mentioned Araxis Merge ($128).

Tax textbook and Manu's Imagination Challenge book

2008-04-02T07:25:00.000-07:00

I have felt quite busy lately. Here is a pic of my textbook for the class, Income Tax, that I started last week. I also added it to my 22books p rofile.

The class is the latest in my evening program to get a Masters in Professional Accountancy (MPA) and then take the CPA exam in 2010 or 2011.

I also finished a book, The Imagination Challenge, for the Technical Communication journal book review section. That book review should appear later this year.

Usability meeting and favorite WritersUA sessions

2008-03-25T07:48:00.000-07:00

Puget Sound SIGCHI is having its monthly meeting this Thursday. I might have to miss it, but here is the description that came to my inbox from them:

Puget Sound SIGCHI AnnouncePlus list
(event) 3/27, Why poor product design is all too common – and how to avoid it, Puget Sound SIGCHI, Bellevue

“Designing frustrating software. Why poor
product design is all too common – and how to avoid it with six key design
ideas” is the topic at this month’s Puget Sound SIGCHI meeting, Thursday, March
27th, in Bellevue. Networking starts at 6, followed by the presentation at 7. No
registration is required for this free meeting of UX professionals.

Abstract:In the software world, poor product design can lead to frustration and wasted time for our customers. Luckily for those of us who make software, users won't notice less-than-optimal design until after they've paid for our product!
Because of this fact, developers can safely ignore pesky considerations like
"usability" and "good design" without negatively impacting the success of a
product. After all, isn’t it better to measure success by initial sales
than by customer satisfaction? In this presentation, Sanjeev Verma will
teach developers, testers, and designers how to save valuable time during the
usability design phase of the product cycle and apply it where it really counts:
on developing new features. He will present his “Six Steps to Success”,
which help developers write feature-packed products without spending too much
time on “trivialities” like usability. In the software world, poor product
design can lead to frustration and wasted time for our customers.

On the other hand, Kendra Yourtee will provide real, concrete practices that software engineers can use in their daily routines to improve the usability of the
products they create. She will also present simple ways to test designs
against real-life scenarios. Although usability is a topic that has been
covered at great length, many of the accepted design conventions lack
explanations of where and how to apply them. Worse still, others are
entirely untrue or outdated. Kendra will turn Sanjeev’s “Six Steps to
Success” into six key design ideas that will be useful for anyone who is
interested in understanding how usability can help them design a better
product.Bios:Sanjeev Verma is currently a Program Manager after working for six
years as a software developer. He knows how easy it is to create frustrating
software and how important it is to fight that tendency. Sanjeev graduated from
Rice University in 2002, worked as a Software Developer at National Instruments
for four years, and now works on Hyper-V at Microsoft.

Kendra Yourtee has worked as a User Interface (UI) Program Manager for over three years, and was previously a UI tester. She knows firsthand what happens when users can't use products—they take their business elsewhere. Kendra graduated from Boston University with a double degree in computer science and mathematics but found her real passion was for customer-centered UI design. In her current role as a Technical Program Manager at Amazon.com she works hard to design simple solutions for complex problems.Location:Construx (in central Bellevue near the transit center) 10900 NE 8th, Suite 1350, Bellevue 98004
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Puget Sound Special Interest Group on Computer-Human Interaction (SIGCHI) is a
non-profit, local SIG chapter of the Association of Computing Machinery serving
the Puget Sound region's interface design, usability, and research communities.

http://www.pssigchi.org/

I need to do a good write-up of my experience at the WritersUA conference, but I'm in the process of finishing up a book to review for the Tech Comm journal. In summary, though, three sessions stood out for me, so you might want to find out more about them:

Integrating Different Types of User Assistance with On-Demand Software - Andrea Leszek, salesforce.com
Emulating Vista Help with RoboHelp and Flare - Rob Houser
Analyzing Your Audience, Constructing Personas and Conducting Internal Dialogs - Dave Farkas and Jean Farkas

http://www.writersua.com/ohc/tracks.htm

Feb 2008 recap

2008-03-08T18:38:00.000-08:00

Feb 2008 recap

Attended ACCT 535 class - Database Management Systems; had a mid-term, did a research paper, and finished an Access project.
Attended the Google UX presenter, Jake Knapp (I would have attended the STC Adobe evening, but I was ill that night).
Met a great new co-worker, Pappi. Watched movies on the weekends, watched a little of the Oscars, watched a little American Idol.
Had dinner with my cousin.
Watched PGA and European Tour golf.

Great user experience designs that don't require manuals

2008-03-08T17:24:00.000-08:00

I came across this "you won't need them" verbiage this morning on an FAQ page and had to share it. The founders of this Web app, Tick, seem to think that it's so easy to use that you won't need even one Help topic as you use it. They say the following:

"Tick is a joy to use. The interface is simple, friendly, and straight-forward. No surprises. Tick is designed with a gentle learning curve in mind. No manuals or extensive help files. You won't need them."

I had to share it because on the one hand that assumption is funny, but on the other hand, I applaud an app that has such great usability that a lengthy user guide is not necessary.

It brought to mind Jared Spool's 2007 Minneapolis STC Summit comments where he apparently said something along the lines that technical writing is a dying field. Also, the Tick FAQ page says "Tick is a joy to use," which brings to mind Don Norman's book, Emotional Design.

Most of all, this Tick verbiage reminded me of the following:

It is important for user assistance professionals to get excited about great designs instead of thinking of great usability as a threat to our job. When the user experience (UX) team introduces a user interface (UI) that guides users through a process such that it makes our Help topic redundant or unnecessary, we need to applaud that UI rather than feel unimportant.
It is great when a UI helps us reduce our word count for one or more procedures, or when we can instead focus on providing more examples or concepts for users who want to delve deeper than what the simple UI shows them. Or a help topic's content could focus on answering frequently asked questions for the UI, rather than repeating the tasks that they can already recognize. Or the Help can provide some reference information or link to a video tutorial library that you created.
It is nice when a usable design frees us up to attack other projects, create a Web page of training articles, respond to user feedback, investigate a better Help UI/experience (such as text resizing in Adobe AIR), include more workflow diagrams or other visual aids, attend conferences, attend other training, remake ourselves into SDK writers, and so on.
If you don't have UX professionals recommending design changes to your application, you could try to fill that gap. To start slowly, you could suggest that you write all error message text, tool tip mouse-overs, Wizard text, status bar help, text that appears at the top of a dialog box, and field/tab/button labels.

In brief, a great UX isn't a threat, it's something that's welcome. At the same time, if an app (Web applications included) doesn't provide Help, you can step up to provide that if it's indeed needed.
In other news, the South by Southwest Festival is going on now: http://sxsw.com/
In addition, the WritersUA conference is next week. Also, this Tuesday, March 11, is the Puget Sound STC chapter meeting at the Bellevue Coast Hotel, where the topic is Panel: Expanding Career Opportunities in Technical Communication: http://stc-psc.org/upcoming-events/stcevent.2007-12-29.3715598975
PAC-10 conference bball tourney is this week. My database class ends this week; the next one will be Introduction to Tax, so I'll post the name of that texbook on 22books (Hansen books list), too.

SIGCHI presentation notes, Jake Knapp, Google UI Designer, Feb 2008

2008-02-29T07:29:00.000-08:00

I attended the standing-room-only Puget Sound SIGCHI (www.pssigchi.org) event at Google Seattle (Fremont) last night. BlaringSmelly already posted some notes. Also, announcement at the Interaction Design Association.
My notes:
Google Usability Lab with Tobii Studio software is awesome

The evening started by touring their newly opened usability lab. This was basically a demo of the eye-tracking software that Google uses, which is called Tobii Studio analysis software. Tobii will have an exhibitor booth at the upcoming CHI conference in Italy in April (Seattle's own Mary Czerwinski and Arnie Lund are the General Conference Chairs). In brief, the Google lab is very nice, with separate rooms for those watching the usability experiment and for those participating. Google uses the software at both its Mountain View and Seattle locations.
It was really neat to see how quickly you can calibrate the system (no weird helmet or external camera devices needed because the camera is built-in to the hardware that Tobii uses) to capture that participant's eye movements accurately (under 2 minutes). Then, the calibration is finished and you can have the participant start the experiment and follow both the amount of time that they dwell on objects and the path of their eyes.

Jake Knapp talks about Getting Things Done

Then, we filed into the presentation room, where a lot of us had to stand because they were not expecting so many people. The presenter, Jake Knapp, UI designer at Google then talked about one of his favorite books, Getting Things Done. He highly recommends that you read the book and try the system. One of the things is that if something is going to take only 2 minutes to do, do that thing now rather than later. He also scans his email and clicks the Archive button in gmail to filter things out of his inbox. He also flags items (with a Gmail Star) for later follow-up and then visits the starred bin as needed.
Another trick is that he created a separate calendar in Google Calendars that is solely for Reminders. He marks his reminder calendar with an item and then sets that item to send him a reminder to his Gmail inbox; that way, the reminder is right in front of him in his inbox when he needs it.

Jake Knapp talks about Priority of UX Projects

He then talked about which projects at Google get priority for the UX team. The answer is those projects that will impact the most people, so Google.com Home page projects, Blogger, Gmail, and so on. The UX people try to maintain a formal library of past interaction design examples that work so that they are not reinventing the wheel all of the time. They also spend quite a bit of time in meetings to put their heads together. They seek out those people who have done before what they are trying to do now.
They do a lot of rapid prototyping and try to give Devs an example of either something that's already existing and produced, or something that they have mocked up that others have agreed is good. The Devs will often have great usability ideas, too, so everyone often contributes great ideas. The UX Researchers bring data to the table, the UX Designers ensure UI designs and interactions are of high quality, Web developers implement the ideas, and Project Managers (PMs) guide the projects.

Jake Knapp on great presentations

To do great presentations, do the 10/20/30 rule, which keeps presentations to no more than 10 slides, no more than 20 minutes in length, and a font size of at least 30; a video is available: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=liQLdRk0Ziw. Try to keep bullet points to a maximum of 3 words per bullet; this helps you focus on talking and not read the slides (and avoid having your audience read your slide instead of listen to you). UX professionals should try to be really good at presentations (as Jake is) because, at Google at least, UX professionals are constantly presenting their ideas to others, trying to communicate technical information and convince the audience of the message.
One key to a good presentation is to come up with an idea of the desired Feeling and desired Action that you want the audience to leave your presentation with (Jake always tries to have two feelings and two actions in mind before he gives a presentation).

Great night. Great presentation. Well worth standing up for it. If you're a SIGCHI member, you can check out a DVD of the presentation from the SIGCHI librarian (me, with help from Ann Miller and Dom Dellino); the DVD should be ready at one of the next few meetings, or for sure by the fall meetings.

SIGCHI meeting in Seattle tonight, topic is Google projects

2008-02-28T17:38:00.000-08:00

Puget Sound SIGCHI event tonight. I'll post notes about it later; perhaps someone will post a video of it at Google Video, too. Below is the description about the meeting that came to my inbox:

Doing good work in a fast paced engineering environment at Google is the topic of this month’s Puget Sound SIGCHI meeting Thursday, February 28, at the new Google office in Fremont, 651 N. 34th St. No registration is required for this free meeting of UX
professionals. Networking starts at 6 pm, with the presentation at
7 pm. Job announcements will follow.

Description
Projects at Google move fast with small teams. Jake Knapp, UI designer at Google, will talk about tactics the user experience team uses to have the maximum impact—even when there isn't enough time.

Jake will share the process and tips and tools that have helped his team. For instance, using "Getting Things Done" with Gmail and Google Calendar to keep organized, how to give effective presentations, and how to conduct a UX workshop with your team. All this, and more, will be crammed into one hour. Cause we
love compressed schedules!

Bio
Jake Knapp is a UI designer at Google, formerly at Microsoft and Oakley.

Location: Google Seattle
Waterside Building
651 North
34th Street
Seattle, WA 98103

Sessions that I plan to attend in a few weeks at WritersUA

2008-02-15T07:33:00.000-08:00

Having been a resident for nearly seven years now, I am a big fan of the Pacific Northwest. I love the states that comprise the Pacific Northwest almost as much as I love the states that comprise the Great Plains (had I grown up here, I would love it here better I'm sure). I love Chicago, too (having lived there a couple of years), but a walk down memory lane is for another day.
So, I'm excited to head to Portland in a few weeks for the WritersUA conference. Below are the sessions that I plan to attend; while I really like the more technical side of technical communication, my role right now is heavy-duty writing of HTML topics, so I plan to focus on that instead of the tools (it is another person's role to focus on the tools side of things).
I encourage you to read through the sessions as a way to stay abreast of trends: http://www.writersua.com/.

10:45 am - 12:00 pm Monday
Beyond Step by Step: The Architecture of Procedural Content • lpCheri Lockett Zubak
1:15 - 2:45 pm
Emulating Vista Help with RoboHelp and FlareRob Houser
3:30 - 4:45 pm
FARKAS (Audience, Personas, and Internal Dialogs) (Guided Help session also looked great)

8:30 - 9:45 am
Developing Interactive eLearning w/ Captivate (Hands-on) • lpPart One • Rob Houser
10:15 am - 11:30 am
Using Visual Hierarchy to Convey Information Luke Wroblewski
1:00 - 2:15 pm
Integrating Different Types of UA with On-Demand Software Andrea Leszek (Word templates session also looked good)
2:45 - 4:00 pm
Achieving Business Value by Integrating Tasks, Topics and Content • lp Duane Degler

8:30 - 9:45 am
Techniques for Reviewing a User Interface Rhonda Bracey
10:00 - 11:15 am
Task Support Clusters: A Micro-architecture for User Assistance • lp Michael Hughes -OR- APIs -OR- embedded UA w/Scott DeLoach (tough choice)
1:15 - 2:45 pm
Rapid Prototyping Techniques for Developing User Assistance • lp Alan Houser
3:15 - 4:15 pm
Closing Session, User Assistance Trends Panel: Key Future Directions

Also, Vancouver, BC, is nice, too, and if you prefer a small conference, DocTrain West is coming up in May. At the very least, you can read about Tom Johnson's presentation and start reading the TC bloggers who will be a part of his session (called Meet the Bloggers): Anne Gentle (JustWriteClick.com), Darren Barefoot (http://www.darrenbarefoot.com/), Scott Nesbitt (http://www.dmncommunications.com/weblog/), and Aaron Davis (http://www.dmncommunications.com/weblog/). Also, you can do a search on each of the WritersUA presenters to see which of them have a blog: http://www.writersua.com/ohc/spkr_A_Z.htm. Or you can have a look at Tom's tech writer blog directory.

January 2008 recap

2008-02-02T23:39:00.000-08:00

I am going to try and do a recap of each month this year so that it's easier to write my Christmas card at the end of the year.
Here is what I did in January 2008:

Read the book, Richistan. Great book. I recommend it. It reminded me of the excellent book, Who Really Cares, because they both discuss charitable giving in depth, which is important.
Attended ACCT 535 class - Database Management Systems.
Signed up for WritersUA Conference and am excited to attend in March 2008 (will post about which sessions I plan to attend in a future post).
Attended the STC Competition Showcase (did not attend SIGCHI because it was canceled for the month).
Caught up on Intercom articles from Nov, Dec, and January (will post about which articles were a highlight in a future post).
Met a great new co-worker, Travis. Attended the company holiday party and won a raffle prize (movie-themed gift basket). Watched movies on the weekends. Starting getting BusinessWeek magazine in the mail as a gift from my mom. My nephew continues his attempts to use the big potty.
Read my cousin's self-published book and really enjoyed it.
Watched New England Patriots NFL games on TV. Watched PGA golf.

STC Puget Sound competition 2008 showcase notes

2008-01-22T20:32:00.000-08:00

So I took a crappy picture with my phone, but you get the idea. Tonight was the STC Puget Sound Competition Showcase, and people enjoyed it.

There were many highlights of the night for me, but if you are a Microsoft® employee, check your intranet for "Creating Accessible Content." This training is for Content Publishers and was created in part by Alex Blanton. Very nice training, both for the content itself and also for the creativity involved in creating the deliverable.

My other highlights

Boeing Everett Factory intranet that the Creative Services team did
Regence training
IT Showcase DVD (Microsoft®)
Windows Vista and Windows Server 2008 Troubleshooting Content (Microsoft®)
Robust Test Code Series: Introduction to Code Refactoring (Microsoft®)
The Alaska Park Science Journal
Advanced Microsoft® Office Documents 2007 Edition Inside Out (Microsoft®)
Walking around with my manager—these things are always better if you have someone you've known for several years to talk to as you browse, and it's even better if you get to discuss ways to improve current projects
The best highlight was listening to submitters who were excited about their work (last year I worked a volunteer table, so this was my first year of getting to really chat with submitters). Quite a few people genuinely wanted to show me what made their entry great. This isn't people getting excited about a manual (although that's fine, too), it's people getting excited about how they single-sourced with XML and easy-to-use templates, or how someone thinks that I really need to check out such-and-such HTML page because that page is really something. How often do you get a chance to hang out with people who are excited about XML single-sourcing, accessibility training, or intranet pages at 7:00 PM on a Tuesday night? And did I mention the raffle? Great raffle items.

Here are the unofficial Best of Show winners (if I caught it correctly tonight—go to www.stc-psc.org for official results that will be posted in the coming weeks):

2007 Calendar, Department of Environmental and Occupational Health Sciences | Kathy Hall/Cathy Schwartz, Univ of Washington | Tech Publication

Boeing Everett- Future Factory Exibits | John Thonssen | Art

Security 101 | Megan Sidon | MediaPro, Inc | Online

The other thing to say about the STC Competition is that it is a tremendous volunteer effort. The competition manager this year was Andrea Dickson, and she did hours and hours of volunteer work. Speaking from experience, I know how much work a Competition Manager does, and the funny thing is, at the banquet or showcase, it never looks like THAT much work; it doesn't look like that much work because each submitter quietly takes their award certificates and judge feedback home with them or discreetly puts it aside at their table, so it's hard to see that each certificate and judge feedback is multiplied by 90 (roughly 90 submitters). Not to mention the intangible communications: coordinate the committee, coordinate artwork, coordinate judges, communicate with submitters, and so on.
I'm sure that Andrea and Joe Welinske both gave up countless weekends, so if you want to do your part, be a judge next year. If you live in the Seattle area, judging for the next competition will take place November 8, 2008 (yes, Joe already wants you to mark your calendars to do your "giving back" part). I'm sure he'd be happy to discuss your involvement if you pull him aside at this year's WritersUA Conference coming up March 16-19 in Portland, Oregon. So, hats off to the judges, and here's to many more judges volunteering for next year's competition.

View an example of a self-published book, done with Lulu

2008-01-18T07:24:00.000-08:00

If you have a book idea, you might think about self-publishing it. My cousin, Corey, did that through Lulu. You can visit his "storefront" on Lulu; to read the book online—like how you can preview a book on Amazon.com, except here you can read the entire book instead of just previewing it—you click the book's link and then click the Preview button.

It is actually a very touching book and offers readers a chance to go back in time to life on a South Dakota farm in the 1950s. Doing something like this makes a great Christmas present because you can orders hardcopies to pass out (and sell).

Storefront:
http://stores.lulu.com/coreymagstadt

Read his blog post where he introduces the book (see the December 28, 2007, post):

http://learning-to-listen.blogspot.com/

(my cousin is a minister, which is evident in his blog postings)

STC Competition Showcase meeting preview, database class update, and other updates

2008-01-17T17:20:00.000-08:00

Next Tuesday, the Puget Sound STC chapter is having award winners from this year's competition come and discuss their winning works (online Help, Books, user guides, and more). The cost of this Competition Showcase is free if you register by this Friday at 5 PST, so you can't beat that.

I need to write a post about the topics that I'm learning in my Database class. You can go to my list at 22books.com to see the Database textbook that we're using in the class. In a nutshell, if you already know about queries, reports, tables, and forms in Access, then you already could have done our first assignment. Then, if you know how to read Entity Relationship Diagrams (ERDs) and understand the concepts of inner and outer joins, you're already up to where we're at in the book (chapter 6). More about these topics later.

Another interesting tidbit is that the student accounting club is having as their guest speaker the Washington Society of CPAs president; this makes me think: when was the last time your STC chapter president spoke in front of a group of undergraduate or graduate students to try and heighten their interest about your organization?

What else have I been doing lately: swimming, socializing, and reading Discover Your Inner Economist.

USPS self-service kiosk has good usability

2008-01-12T18:22:00.000-08:00

Last weekend, I was about 30 minutes too late to get a human being behind the counter at a U.S. Postal Service post office, so I read the sign on the door that said that a 24-hour self-service kiosk was available near the post office boxes. I then proceeded to use the machine to print the postage sticker for my package and was immediately struck by the touch screen's text: How may I help you?

This use of anthropomorphism was a little odd, but I used the machine and found it to be great. However, on the final screen, the machine again used the word "I" in a sentence, which again struck me as an odd design choice. This self-service USPS kiosk has won a People's Choice award at a self-service conference (among other awards), and I can see why, but this use of giving a machine human-like qualities was the one poor design decision for an otherwise usable kiosk (although it asks you for the dimensions of the package if you do not have a pre-paid USPS fixed-rate box, which is annoying because you would think that the kiosk would be able to detect any dimension data auotmatically to help speed up the kiosk experience).

To read more about this machine, see http://www.postalreporter.com/self_service.htm
and http://www.sska.org/article_3370_23.php.

Other miscellaneous usability/tech comm news:

Detect User Problems and Find Help
Ars Technica - January 03, 2008
Microsoft might patent technology that perceives when a user is frustrated and then asks other users for help. http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20080103-microsoft-patents-frustration-detecting-help-system.html

Moving toward a Simpler Digital Nirvana
Seattle P-I - January 03, 2008
Employees are testing Microsoft's digital entertainment
products in their own homes in an effort to give the company an edge in a
fiercely competitive market.
http://seattlepi.nwsource.com/business/346027_msfthome04.html

Report: Microsoft Redesigns Home Page to Promote Silverlight
CMP Channel - January 03, 2008
Microsoft reportedly is using its Silverlight technology
to redesign its home page in an effort to increase adoption of its
cross-platform multimedia runtime. http://www.crn.com/software/205207880

UWTV - watch it in the Seattle area or use their on-demand videos to access any show at any time
Microsoft’s Joe Hellerstein explains how he applies
control theory to resource management solutions in computing systems in "Lessons
Learned from Applying Control Theory to Computing Systems: A Manifesto for
Resource Management Engineering."
Date: Jan. 23 Time: 10 p.m. PT
http://www.uwtv.org/programs/displayevent.aspx?rID=21530&fID=2318

del.icio.us

My book list for 2008 and a visual book recap of 07 and 06

2008-01-04T22:47:00.000-08:00

Thanks to my friend, Jennifer, for creating her book list and then telling me that I needed to do mine. Below is the link to my list on 22Books.com, which shows you a picture of the book cover, my comments, a bio of the book, and a link to Amazon.

http://22books.com/lists/show/137/Hansen%2BBooks

One of the neat things about using this site is that the coder built it with Ruby on Rails and plans to post more blog posts about how he built it: http://www.dotavery.com/blog/. I plan to add that blog to my Google Reader now. I'm thinking that he (the developer) built it with an Amazon API or some other API that acts as a service for him to submit your query to a books repository and return the results back. The site has great usability and is an example of the new round of Web apps that developers are doing with freely available APIs and with Ajax; this application is fast, usable, powerful (enter an ISBN or a few title keywords and the search results greet you in one second), and enjoyable (think Emotional Design by Don Norman). The "Edit comment" link is buggy, but I used it heavily and it's still a good example of how Ajax makes it nice because the page doesn't have to reload after each comment to slow you down and disturb your enjoyable experience creating the book list.

Also, if you need to know how to add a Digg button to the new Blogger template, the best article on this subject is in a blog post from Brian Cantin.
del.icio.us

Heidi's Year 2007 - a recap

2007-12-31T07:50:00.000-08:00

Here is what happened to me in 2007:

Did 6 podcasts with Tom Johnson and met him in Vancouver at DocTrain West. The podcasting was fun but when I got accepted into the Accounting Masters degree evening program that I'll be starting next week, I knew it sadly had to end my involvement. The podcasts are now integrated with Tom's very popular idratherbewriting.com blog, and I intend to keep listening to them.
Lost 25 pounds doing SparkPeople.com that Tom introduced me to. Plan to continue that. Many, many, many trips to the Farmers Market all summer to eat fresh and local.
Started a project at work related to Microsoft Dynamics. Met great new people through that. I am the User Assistance Lead. Met other great new people at work, too. Played a lot of fun tennis and soccer with coworkers.
Submitted three book reviews for the Technical Communication journal for publication (one about RSS feeds, one about User-Centered Design case studies, and one about XML). Plan to finish the latest book review (Interaction Design textbook) tomorrow for editing. I love how you get to keep the books when you're finished with them, and I also love how it forces you to read books in our field throughout the year. It takes quite a bit of time (hence no podcasting since summer) if you select thick books for yourself, but it's worth it in my opinion.
Trips back to the Great Plains to see my family twice (once for 80th grandpa birthday and once for 50th grandparent anniversary). Saw growth of niece and nephew, which is awesome. Saw brother's new house go up. Also, family and friends had surgeries, but they all did great. Served Thanksgiving dinner with others to less fortunate in Seattle. Important weddings (Leroy, Kyle, Justin). Finally saw an old friend again after about 5 years, and it was like old times (we had a great hike together).
Trip to Portland and the Oregon coast that left me still hearing the ocean waves for days afterwards. New wood floors.
Heard a few presentations from Microsoft, Blink Interactive, and Boeing UX professionals at Puget Sound SIGCHI meetings: Monty Hammontree, Jennifer Duncan, Heidi Adkisson, Mary Czerwinski, and Hugh McLoone.
Started the year by helping Joe Welinske with the STC Competition Showcase event in January and then attended some additional great STC presentations later in the year: From Expense to Asset - Making Content Powerful (Donna Sakson), Trends in Technical Communication (panel of UW professor, Google writer, Microsoft manager, and others), and the UW Research and Design Showcase.
Prepped application materials to submit to Central Washington University's evening Masters in Professional Accountancy (MPA) program. Got accepted.
Read numerous good books and added Google Reader shared items and Twitter tweets to blog (see sidebar for all). Read many blog posts this year to keep up with trends. Numerous good films watched.
http://www.flickr.com/photos/hhansenseattle/

Here is what I'd like to see happen in 2008:

25 more pounds lost, more art seen, more vacations out of town, more fiction books read
more work skills obtained (starts with the Database class in January)
more competitions entered (starts with a swim meet in March and then either triathlons, open-water swims, tennis, or 5K, 10K, or Half-marathon runs)
more of the same, fun stuff

del.icio.us

Great example of usability

2007-12-23T07:21:00.000-08:00

Most wizards in software are big, long, and clunky, but I did a wizard last Friday that was really well done. It was the wizard that you use to set up Outlook rules, which tell Outlook to stuff certain emails into different folders.

The reason why I liked the wizard so much is for the following reasons:

Small dialog box - there is something about a small dialog box that psychologically makes you think that the task will be simple.
A few canned templates - the templates are of the most common rules so that you can pick your template and be half-way finished with creating the rule right off the bat.
Intuitive check boxes and links - these controls in the small dialog box guide you to quickly complete the wizard. Click the two links, enter the information, click Done, and you're finished with the wizard and your rule is created. Simple as that.

The other feature of Outlook that I like is their Help. It opens on the side, encourages you to do a quick search, presents the results as links, you click the link to obtain the Help, you complete the steps, and then you're done. Very quick and useful. For example, if you ever need to do a Mail Merge, the Help is so useful: search, click the link to open the topic, do the steps, and then you're done.
I usually do an Offline Search because I trust that the Help will have the quick Help information that I need, but I appreciate that the Search Online option is available if I need to cast a wider net to sources of information outside of the Help or obtain the latest Help topic information.
del.icio.us

Art trip, film recommendation, accounting degree

2007-12-09T11:05:00.001-08:00

1125070959.jpg
Originally uploaded by heidilhansen

I start the accounting master's degree classes January 3, so expect a post after nearly every course because I think that many of you might like to learn some of the same things that I will be learning. I only have one class the first term, and it is about building databases for an accounting system. I am guessing that quite a few of you document client-server systems with databases on the backend, so a lot of what I learn will apply to you, too, even though your app may not be accounting related.
In other news, I highly recommend the movie, The Lives of Others. If you need to get your mind off your current project, that movie will do the trick.
The interaction design book continues to be good. I plan to do a book review for Tech Comm journal but also post key lessons learned here. Yesterday I was reading chapter 6 about the interaction experiences from the 1980s, 1990s, and now to the present. The best part was about the research around multimedia and when text is best versus video.
del.icio.us

What I think technical writers should contribute to

2007-12-02T20:50:00.001-08:00

1201071652a.jpg
Originally uploaded by heidilhansen

What I love about snow is that it gives a built-in excuse to spend the whole day reading--and watching some football. Today, the books on tap were Waiting, the usability textbook, and An Infinity of Little Hours.
In other news, I wanted to stress the four things that I think tech writers should contribute to: error messages, text in wizards and other text visible on the screen, What's New release announcements, and blogs-forums where the Doc Team shares what they've been working on, but also asks the customers for their opinions about what Help they would like to see or would appreciate the most. I also really like initiatives where Support and Doc work together to produce a list of all error messages and how to solve them, and then publish that to the Web so that if someone Googles the text of an error message, they have your published Help at their fingertips.
del.icio.us

Mossberg and Pogue give usability feedback

2007-11-29T07:55:00.000-08:00

Usability is front and center in this Walt Mossberg review of the Amazon Kindle.

Read the article for free:
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB119629309068607131.html?mod=hpp_us_editors_picks

Also, this David Pogue review of the revised Zune is another example of usability feedback, and it also shows how you can make your technical writing more dynamic with accompanying photos and a video:
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/11/29/technology/personaltech/29pogue.html?_r=1&oref=slogin

del.icio.us

Added a tag cloud and tag list to my blog

2007-11-23T17:47:00.000-08:00

I added some Web 2.0 elements to my blog today: twitter tweets (most recent two), tag list (I went back and tagged every one of my posts so that you can now click these tag categories to view "like" posts together), tag cloud, and new "look and feel."
I still want to do more with recent comment boxes, stats, trackbacks, social bookmarking links such as del.icio.us, Silverlight, Popfly, AJAX, and widgets, but those fun things will need to wait until later.
To add these things, I just read the Help Center on Blogger, the FAQs on Twitter, and did a Google search for Tag Cloud for Blogger and executed the instructions that someone had posted about inserting code into three different sections of your new Blogger template.
del.icio.us

1118071511.jpg - fiction book read

2007-11-21T21:05:00.001-08:00

1118071511.jpg
Originally uploaded by heidilhansen

Here is a pic of a book that I read last weekend. It is called Balzac and the Little Chinese Seamstress. It reads like a brisk, great short story, so I recommend it. I don't know about you but after I read numerous nonfiction books in a row, I really hunger for a fiction story. And I really don't understand not reading at all as an adult, as that report about Americans stated earlier this week. Currently, I am reading the usability textbook and a fiction book called Waiting. Happy Thanksgiving in the U.S.

AmazonKindle: my two cents

2007-11-20T07:51:00.000-08:00

For all of us readers out there, the AmazonKindle is pretty interesting news. Story and video here:
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB119548243743597877.html?mod=hpp_us_editors_picks

Pic here:

The coolest part is the wireless aspect, where it's hooked up to an always-on cell phone network that "just works." Here is why I would not buy it, though:

I get my books from the library, or in the case when I actually buy about three books per year, I enjoy supporting my local bookstore.
My library will probably have this device for me to check-out for free if I wait a little while.
Subscription fee of $.99 per month just to read blogs. I get those on my cell phone as part of my monthly rate now via Google Reader, not to mention that my monthly cell phone rate includes on-demand David Letterman videos, on-demand news, and so on.
Subscription needed to read the Wall Street Journal. No thanks; the WSJ will be offered for free soon, so just get an iPhone with Safaria and browse away as part of your monthly iPhone subscription.
The Gphone will probably have everything that the reader has (minus the books), except for free. And I already covered the books aspect earlier: LIBRARY.
No page turning. This past weekend, I read a fiction book because I wanted to get my mind off computers, bits and bytes. If my reader has a microprocessor in it, it takes some of the "escaping" experience out of it. Granted, I read the fiction book for its content, but still.
This was just a quick opinion; I'm sure that there are much more thoughtful and interesting posts about this topic, but as an avid reader, I do welcome the device for ultra-mobile people or kids who think it's "cool" because if it gets people to read beyond the current 7 MINUTES PER DAY!?!, I'm all for it (I just want it embedded in the next iPod device, though, so that I don't need to carry another device).

1117071021.jpg - artisan show and bloggers to read

2007-11-17T13:26:00.001-08:00

1117071021.jpg
Originally uploaded by heidilhansen

So which blogs are your top few that you enjoy? Just now I fired up my google reader on my mobile phone to check up on my top 3 bloggers of choice, which are idratherbewriting.com, Dontcallmetina.wordpress.com, and Programmableweb.com. I also really like Brier Dudley, Freakonomics at nytimes.com, Keith Instone, Helpstuff, and Pogue at nytimes.com. I also like to scan the MSDN blogs with my google reader subscription feed because I can scan recent posts rather than all posts. What are a few that you try not to miss that I don't have listed here?

Well, that's about it for this moblog post. As the pic shows, I attended the artisan show today and had a great time getting away from the computer and looking at art.

STC Nov07 meeting notes and random thoughts

2007-11-15T12:49:00.000-08:00

Here is an image that made me laugh today. I went online to search for the livemeeting presentations from World Usability Day (but couldn't find them), but on the livemeeting page, there was this image with a gift on it. I probably don't need to explain why it was funny, but even if you think that I'm an "Office Fan," I really do not need an Office-related gift this year. Like appliances for mothers, well, you get the picture.

I didn't attend the STC Puget Sound chapter meeting this past Tuesday, but I did a search online to see if anyone had posted the Top 10 Job Seeking Mistakes in a list format (Jack Molisani presented on this topic at the chapter meeting this past Tuesday), and I did find this blog post:

http://altmilan.blogspot.com/2006/12/january-stc-toronto-meeting.html

The second paragraph of that post has a link to a PDF file where you can read the 10 mistakes, as they were written in 2006 (Molisani has likely refreshed the list a little bit in the past year, but you get the picture).

This coming weekend has on tap for me some reading in the usability textbook that I started last weekend and also an artisan showcase: http://www.art-seattle.com/

As for Tom's post about podcasting, to me, podcasting would be better if you could just touch a button in your car like you can with a radio. I envision an AppleTV interface (picture was provided in a previous post that I did about a year ago when the WSJ reviewed AppleTV) and then you just quickly navigate to TechWriterVoices with a couple of clicks and press play (it downloaded the latest episode for you via rss when you were at work). The task of sitting at the PC to obtain the latest episode is a drag, but worth the effort on weeks when you know you'll have time to listen to it, and you know it beats your other audio options in your car.

1111071003.jpg - world usability day comment

2007-11-11T10:19:00.001-08:00

1111071003.jpg
Originally uploaded by heidilhansen

So here is another Sunday post. This one is to say that the judging yesterda was great. I found out that the world usability day presentations should all be posted to livemeeting so that I can watch them on demand next weekend. Peggy recommended the Vista guidelines presentation especially because it showed a Before and After of an error message. Also, I picked the brain of Joe Welinske a little bit and was energized by what he has been working on lately. In addition to his superb WritersUA conference, he has also been working on some ideas around where tech writers ought to be spending their time. good stuff.

TC and HCI articles and research databases at your fingertips

2007-11-11T08:51:00.000-08:00

I think that the following two resources are likely underutilized by practitioners, so have a 1-minute look today and then bookmark them for handy reference when questions come up in your projects in the future:

http://tc.eserver.org/

EServer Technical Communication Library

http://hcibib.org/

HCI Bibliography : Human-Computer Interaction Resources

Easy way to keep up with tech comm trends

2007-11-10T07:55:00.001-08:00

1107072102.jpg
Originally uploaded by heidilhansen

I thought that I sent this from my phone to my blog earlier this week, but I think that I entered the Flickr e-mail address incorrectly, so the post never got posted. What I said was that a great way to keep up with trends is to volunteer your time with the STC competition.

I did that this past week, sifting through entries to ensure that they were in the correct categories and to review the entry forms to try and clear up any confusing things on it so that judges can have a smoother day of judging on their Judging Day. It's a great way to see what people are producing, what people are proud of, which tools they're using to produce it, what content people are spending their days writing about, which entries you are most interested in, which entries seem to be the ones that would win Best of Show, and so on.

You also get to meet new people in your local tech comm community, so it's a networking thing, too. If you sift through entries, it only takes a few nights per week or a full Saturday, and you get a lot more benefit out of it than your time put in. Today is judging day, which will be a great social day, too.

I'm going to try and get online tomorrow and provide links to my favorite summaries that people posted about World Usability Day. This year's theme was Healthcare, but there were a lot of events not centered around healthcare, too. I especially want to read notes from the people who attended some of the Microsoft speakers in Redmond this past Thursday, and also the events at the UW that took place last Thursday evening.

Professional XML book read

2007-11-10T07:37:00.001-08:00

1104071859.jpg
Originally uploaded by heidilhansen

I finished this book, Professional XML, last week and submitted my book review to the Technical Communication book review editor, so the review will be in the journal issue probably in Q1 2008. My next review is a user-centered design tome, so I will be starting that this week. Now you can see why my podcasting days with Tom Johnson are over for at least a while, but I still love the show and support it 100%.

How Flickr does their Help

2007-11-04T18:31:00.000-08:00

The way that Flickr does their Help is very "Web 2.0" because they have official Help and user-written help. Flickr users are encouraged to read the in-house, official Help with these words: "...look through our FAQ for official answers." The Web 2.0/wiki-style help is the content in their forum, which they invite you to read in addition to the official answers (and the content that is searched if you enter terms in the Search field is from their forum only); the way that they introduce the forum is as follows: "peruse the goldmine of information in our public forum." Also, the tone of their Help is extremely casual, even more casual than Google's tone in their Help.

What does this mean for technical communicators? It could mean that this style is the future of how more of us will present our work: official answers versus the user-created content, and both are given equal treatment as great places to locate your answers. It also shows us the popularity of FAQs and of a casual tone. I also found it interesting that the Help is not presented as a Table of Contents with books and other formal ways of presenting Help—it's just the FAQs with various headings to divide up the large number of questions.

Also, just a note about my last post that had the .JPG as the blog title. That post was written on my phone, and I am going to leave those titles because it shows you quickly which posts were written on my phone and which weren't. Those posts will always be short, so they will probably be worth reading because it will take you such a short time to read them, and then they provide a good, succinct update or thought.

0908071556.jpg - moblogging

2007-11-04T18:16:00.001-08:00

0908071556.jpg
Originally uploaded by heidilhansen

Well, this is a quick post to say that I am going to try to do more frequent posts and some mobile posts from my phone...moblogging - Mobile blogging. This photo was taken with my phone in September. The moblogging came about because I read the Web 2.0 issue of Intercom today and the one article talked about how he sends pix to his family via Flickr so that his family can experience things right along with him. Why not do that with everyday events such as STC and Sigchi meetings. Speaking of which, this coming Saturday is Judgment Day and then the week after that is a meeting about the 10 most frequent job hunting mistakes that tech communicators make. This past weekend, I shopped for a gift for a child overseas and then wrapped it--helps me to be a giving person. I snapped a photo of the shoebox and put it on Flickr.

World Usability Day is November 8

2007-11-04T12:54:00.000-08:00

This came across the STC Usability SIG list the other day; it looks like a great usability event:

On November 8, 2007 Microsoft is hosting a one-day UX conference as part
of the World Usability Day (www.worldusabilityday.org)

Leading Microsoft UX professionals will discuss challenges of doing UX
in a technology-driven company and best UX practices.
The event will take place at Microsoft campus in Redmond, WA, USA.

Registration is free.
Register now to attend on-site at
http://www.eventbrite.com/event/70499867/rest
Remote participation will be possible via online conference.

Conference program:

1. Dennis Wixon (Research Manager, MS Games) and August de los Reyes
(Sr. UX Designer)
Making Emotions Work for You: Revolutionizing the theory and practice
of Emotional Design.

2. Donna Flynn (Research Manager, MS Mobile and Embedded Devices)
Impactful Ethnography: Integrating deep insights across company
divisions.

3. Monty Hammontree (UX Director, MS Developer Division)
Data Modeling and Conceptual Sketching in the Development Process.

4. Everett McKay (Sr. Program Manager, MSWindows)
New interaction guidelines for Windows applications -- the Windows Vista
User Experience Guidelines.

5. Cynthia Shelly (Sr. Program Manager, MS Windows), Annuska Perkins
(Sr. Accessibility Strategist, MS Windows), and Tira Cohene (User
Researcher, MS Windows)
Creating usable interfaces for people with disabilities (including us
all as we age and lose visual and aural acuity and dexterity!)

6. Andrew Kirby (Director, National Health Service Common UI Project,
UK)
Learnings from the Healthcare Industry: Trends, challenges and
directions for best principles across this frontier.

7. Arnie Lund (UX Director, MS IT) and Mary Czerwinski (Research Area
Manager, MS Research)
Beyond functionality: What we know about human attention and retention
capabilities

More information:
http://www.worldusabilityday.org/event/show/274

http://www.eventbrite.com/event/70499867/rss

Steve Krug Sigchi Oct 07 meeting notes

2007-10-27T12:05:00.001-07:00

Julie Jacko, SIGCHI President
Originally uploaded by anikarenina

I was unable to attend due to feeling ill, but below are two meeting review blog posts that I found on the Web from others:

"A few of us from the Expression Web team attended a talk by Steve Krug, usability consultant and author of Don't Make Me Think, at an event hosted by the Puget Sound Special Interest Group on Computer-Human Interaction (SIGCHI) in Seattle.

Steve believes there is a short list of design conventions that make some web pages inherently more usable than others, and his talk presented two of these conventions:

1. Effective "You Are Here" indicators
2. Prominent and well-placed page titles

Effective "You Are Here" indicators

Steve suggests that subtle design distinctions that some designers love to craft simply don't work in practice and are less effective than "louder" design choices that clearly establish where you are in a website. To demonstrate how quickly website visitors can plow through a website and overlook subtle design elements, he showed an interesting video of software that tracked his eye movements as he navigated a website in search of information. The software drew red lines all over the web pages, showing the paths of his eye movements, how fast his eyes scanned the page and where his eyes dwelled.

Steve is a big fan of tab-based site navigation, especially when the tab color blends into the page color. For good examples, he pulled up http://www.stumbleupon.com/ with this tabbed navigation:
[image is on their Web site]
and http://www.cnet.com/ with this navigation:
[image is on their Web site]
are often overlooked by users, who will click around within the main content area of the page and not discover the main navigation menu until some time later.

Prominent and well-placed page titles

Steve's second recommendation to help improve the usability of your websites is to simply ensure each page has a primary heading that is bigger (although not necessarily the biggest) and bolder than other headings in the page, and clearly identifies the title or content of the page. He'll give you bonus usability points if your website supports "WYCIWYG" or "what you click is what you get" which means a hyperlink's label and the title of the destination page are the same or virtually the same."

- Anna
http://blogs.msdn.com/xweb/archive/2007/10/26/steve-krug-on-the-perfect-web-page.aspx

The second review is long and great (full of opinions), so here are two selected quotes (and you should just view his full blog post entry using the link below):

"To be honest, Krug’s talk that promised to reveal secrets behind creating a “perfect web page” was a bit disappointing, because it turned out to be nothing more than hammering home two of the most basic IA/user-interface design points for an hour. The two pointers — clearly indicate where you are on the site by highlighting a nav item or using a breadcrumb trail, and use a clear and consistent page title on each page — are not revolutionary by any means, and they’re something most UI designers practice without thinking about them."
- Minoru Uchida (user experience director at POP, a creative agency based in Seattle, Washington)
http://www.moochida.com/yc/2007/10/25/steve-krug-speaks-at-a-sigchi-meeting/

and

"I still liked Krug as a speaker. He comes across as a genuine guy, and he reminds us all to always look at things from the user’s point of view. Also, he doesn’t speak with the Nielsen-esque conviction that you must follow all the rules to be successful. He recognizes that there are plenty of gray areas, that we all make mistakes, and that’s why we should frequently test and evaluate our work to catch the problems."
- Minoru Uchida (user experience director at POP, a creative agency based in Seattle, Washington)
http://www.moochida.com/yc/2007/10/25/steve-krug-speaks-at-a-sigchi-meeting/

Also, one of the other awesome things about Puget Sound SIGCHI is that they bring a camcorder to nearly every meeting and record the presentation, so if you miss a meeting and are a yearly local member (which costs about a whopping $20 per year), you can check out a copy of the presentation from the librarian at any meeting, watch the video, and then return the DVD at the next meeting.

Every professional organization should do this and then allow check-out of the DVDs or post them online for members, or anyone, to freely view. That reminds me, it has been about a year since I last checked out Google Videos, and people are always posting presentations like the Krug SIGCHI presentation online, so I need to watch some more of those. I'll watch some after I exercise, go the library, and read some more of the book that I'm reviewing for the Technical Communication journal, which is called Professional XML.

How to read the Wall Street Journal for free

2007-10-25T07:30:00.000-07:00

Nothing new here if you already use Google News to read newspaper articles, but in case you don't know, you can do an advanced news search on Google News (instructions below). Also, the fact that I did this post is an example of a trend in technical writing: allowing users to search the Internet (in the main Google.com search box, for example) and retrieve a Help topic rather than go to the Google News Help pages. Users care a little bit that the source of the content that they are reading is authoritative, but for simple tasks such as reading news for free, the fact that the Web page that offers them the Help is at the top of the Google search results is authoritative enough.

Go to http://news.google.com/
Click Advanced news search.
In the all box in the top-left, type an asterisk (*) to retrieve all articles.
In the News source box, type wall street journal.
In the Sort drop-down list in the top-right, select Sort by date (newest first) to view all of the articles in the current day's Wall Street Journal newspaper.

Reading the WSJ this way is an alternative to using your library's free Proquest Newspapers database to view the articles for free, too.

Images below of Google News so that you can visually see what to type and enter.

Image 1 - What to click from news.google.com:

Image 2 - What to type in the Advanced news search page:

Steve Krug UX professional meeting preview

2007-10-22T07:47:00.000-07:00

Steve Krug will be speaking in Seattle this Thursday. Here is what the Puget Sound SIGCHI Web site posted about this presentation:

Meeting Details
Topic: Yes, Virginia, there is a perfect Web page
Abstract: Is there really one ideal way to do Web pages—a definitive “best practice”? And if there is, does that mean that all pages should basically look alike? What about creativity and innovative design? Steve Krug, author of Don’t Make Me Think, will explain why he’s become convinced that there actually is a short list of design conventions that make some Web pages inherently better than others—things that very few sites get right, even though they’re not all that hard to do. Besides spelling
out his vision of the perfect Web page, Steve will also present his brand new
Site Navigation Identification Chart: a handy tool that classifies the different
ways to do navigation and helps you choose the best one for your site.
Bio: Steve Krug evaluates and improves interfaces for a wide variety of
clients, primarily in online services and the Web, including Apple, AOL,
Netscape, BarnesandNoble.com, and Lexus.com. In workshops based on his book,
Don’t Make Me Think, he helps people think like a usability expert and make
low-cost/no-cost testing an everyday part of the design process. His consulting
firm, Advanced Common Sense (“just me and a few well-placed mirrors”) is based
in Chestnut Hill, MA.
Time and Date: Thursday, October 25, 2007 6:00 P.M. Networking and refreshments; 7:00 P.M. Presentation
No registration is required for this free meeting of UX professionals.
Location: Adobe, 801 N. 34th St., Fremont area of Seattle, WA 98103
http://pssigchi.acm.org/html/meetings/10_25_2007.html

BusinessWeek article about user friendliness

2007-10-17T16:51:00.000-07:00

Another post without any opinion, but wanted to pass along these articles:

Microsoft and Nokia Attempt to Become User Friendly
BusinessWeek - October 16, 2007
http://www.businessweek.com/technology/content/oct2007/tc20071016_616964.htm?campaign_id=rss_tech

Web 2.0 Summit article in InformationWeek - October 16, 2007
Conference about the impact that new Web technologies are having on various industries.
http://www.informationweek.com/internet/showArticle.jhtml;jsessionid=TQLBVSG3KSCS0QSNDLRCKH0CJUNN2JVN?articleID=202403225

Article about Linux being ready to compete as a viable alternative to Windows
Wall Street Journal - October 17, 2007
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB119253872823060518.html?mod=DCS

Quick update

2007-10-16T17:48:00.000-07:00

Quick post before I quickly update the color of my blog to not be so dark and before I jet to go swim laps. I added social bookmarks to the bottom of my blog posts (something that I have wanted to do for several months now), and I have now started putting a category tag (Blogger calls them "labels") on each post, which will make Tom happy because I know that he posted about the importance of category tags before on his blog. Now that I see this built-in "Labels for this post" field at the bottom of every post composition page, a big "duh" came over me about why I hadn't started doing this earlier.
Anyhoo, quick update to say that I got accepted into the Master's degree program, so I'll be starting the evening classes in accounting in January. Just what I need is another thing on my plate, but some things will have to drop off the plate to make room for this. The education will be fun and then at the end it gets to feel like an accomplishment, which is always good (think Tom's 5 years in Tampa—accomplishment and changes written all over that post).

Intelligent filter quote

2007-10-12T07:56:00.000-07:00

Quick Friday diversion post here: I was reading a Wall Street Journal "Free Today" article (linke below), and it was about falling ad revenue at BusinessWeek and other magazines of its kind. As I said in a post a long time ago, I am more likely to subscribe or purchase a BusinessWeek magazine because of their excellent "Cover Stories" podcast that they offer weekly. In any regard, below is my favorite quote from the free article that I read this morning:

In a world of nonstop information and ever busier schedules, BusinessWeek's
readers want a concise take on the week's business news, says BusinessWeek
President Keith Fox. "Readers want an intelligent filter," he says.
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB119214635778456669.html?mod=hpp_us_editors_picks

Notice how this goes along with Web 2.0. The best blogs serve as an intelligent filter. And that also goes along with Tom's post about how he likes blog posts that actually offer opinions. I don't have time to do that with this post, but just wanted to give him a shout-out that I agree and that I thought he'd like the intelligent filter quote. The quote isn't revolutionary because it just says what we all think and want out of the stuff that we read. Tom and I have talked on TechWriterVoices.com podcasts about how it is nice for the TC journal to have its place because it offers a more authoritative--read intelligent filter--space.

STC article suggestions, SnagIt tip, and general update

2007-10-04T17:11:00.001-07:00

STC 054
Originally uploaded by betsyweber

Every few months, I catch up on STC Intercom magazine and Technical Communication journal articles. Below is what is on my list to read soon as part of my catch-up menu:

August 2007 Technical Communication
The Future of Technical Writing and Editing
pp. 281-282(2)
Author: Hayhoe, George F.

How We Collaborate: Reported Frequency of Technical Communicators' Collaborative Writing Activities
pp. 283-294(12)
Author: Jones, Scott L.

Virtues and Vices of Omission (read beth's blog post that praises this article)
pp. 308-318(11)
Author: Hirst, Russel

Plain English for a Dutch Audience: Comprehension and Preference
pp. 319-332(14)
Authors: Gerritsen, Marinel; Korzilius, Hubert; van Meurs, Frank; Oorsprung, Marjolein

The Convergence of Technical Communication and Information Architecture: Creating Single-source Objects for Contemporary Media
pp. 333-342(10)
Authors: Ford, Julie Dyke; Mott, Richard K.

Adding Motivational Elements to an Instruction Manual for Seniors: Effects on Usability and Motivation
pp. 343-358(16)
Authors: Loorbach, Nicole; Karreman, Joyce; Steehouder, Michaël

Book Reviews
Recent and Relevant

May 2007 Technical Communication

Using Customer Contact Centers to Measure the Effectiveness of Online Help Systems
pp. 201-209(9)
Author: Downing, Joe

From the Structure of Text to the Dynamic of Teams: The Changing Nature of Technical Communication Practice
pp. 210-231(22)
Author: Conklin, James

Writing White Papers in High-tech Industries: Perspectives from the Field
pp. 187-200(14)
Author: Willerton, Russell

Spring into Action
pp. 143-144(2)
Author: Hayhoe, George F.

Also, most articles in the September/October 2007 Intercom - Web 2.0 theme - look good. Same with the "Best of Show" issue, July/August 2007. I do the e-Membership because it's better for the environment (and if just one person in your office gets the regular membership, then they can share their issues with the whole group for those who prefer hardcopy).

Tip of the day (the owner of ProgrammableWeb taught me this, so I have to credit him): If you have a ton of images that you need to resize, you can use SnagIt's Batch Converter feature. This feature allows you to use a wizard in SnagIt to specify which files (or all files in a folder) to convert from some original size to a different size; for example, if you have 50 photos and you want to create thumbnails of all of them, highlight all 50, right-click and select SnagIt>Batch Convert Images. Then, follow the wizard screens, making sure to click the Modify button in the wizard to specify how to resize the images.

I have been enjoying reading Tom's blogs lately, as well as ProgrammableWeb.com blog posts to learn more about mashups and APIs available on the Web. I caught up with trends lately by reading Char's blog, too, on Google Reader on my phone (as well as Holly's). By the way, if you read my blog via RSS, you might like to actually visit my blog home page again because I've started posting my Google Reader Shared items in the right sidebar (thanks to Tom for blazing the trail with his Google Reader Shared items from a link in the top bar of his blog). I have been watching playoff baseball and reading the next book that I'll be reviewing in Technical Communication (book reviews section): Professional XML. So far this year, I've reviewed an RSS book and a user-centered design (UCD) book (the RSS book review is in this TechComm issue and the UCD book review will be in the upcoming Q4 journal issue).

I usually blog about STC and SIGCHI meetings that I've attended recently, but I haven't been to any lately. I would have gone to the Neil Perlin Web 2.0 STC meeting in Seattle on October 1, 2007, but I was on vacation, so it didn't fit into my schedule. I was hoping to read a write-up of it in blog posts, but I couldn't find any, which was disappointing; it seems odd to me that people would attend STC events and not blog about it afterward. Also, I haven't attended any SIGCHI events lately because they take a summer break and then had a fall tutorial event in September that I didn't attend (again, searched for a write-up of the event and couldn't find one anywhere--weird again). They have a meeting coming up later this month that I'll attend, though--I think it's Steve Krug that will be speaking; he wrote the book Don't Make Me Think. I've heard him speak before (and blogged about it if you search my blog), but I'll probably go again because SIGCHI meetings are free.

On another note, I'm still waiting to hear about whether I got into the Accounting Master's degree program. My passion is in user assistance (UA) and user experience (UX), but I also really enjoy financial transactions, so it would be nice to have something on paper (and more education in my head) that shows that side of me, too.

The reason why I originally got online today was to download Brett's latest Zen and the Art of Triathlon podcasts (http://www.zentriathlon.com/). I have been catching up on an entire summer's worth in the past few weeks--they make for great listening while I ride the exercise bike at home or go for walks.

Great usability events in the next couple of months

2007-09-13T07:59:00.000-07:00

Sept 18 - SIGCHI fall tutorial day - Seattle - Larry Keeley talks about HCI and innovation: http://pssigchi.acm.org/html/meetings/tutorial_2007.html

Sept 18 - First STC Puget Sound Chapter Meeting of the Year - Speaker: Brenda Huettner - "Managing Virtual Teams: Getting the Most from Wikis, Blogs, and Other Collaborative Tools" - http://stc-psc.org/

Oct 1 - STC meeting - Neil Perlin - "Creating Help in the Web 2.0 Era" - Pyramid Ale House, Seattle

Oct 13, 14 - InfoCamp Seattle 2007
This came to my inbox courtesy of the SIGCHI AnnouncePlus distribution list:

InfoCamp Seattle 2007 will be a collaborative
BarCamp-style conference for Pacific Northwest Information Architects,
Librarians, User Experience Designers, Usability Engineers, Information
Scientists, Technical Writers and all other user-centered information
professionals.
InfoCamp Seattle 2007 is sponsored by ASIS&T, IAI, the
University of Washington Information School, and Ascentium.
Cost: $20
When: October 13-14, 2007, 9am-6pm
Where: Youngstown Cultural Arts Center
4408 Delridge Way SW
Seattle, Washington
Web: http://asistpnw.org/infocamp2007
It features two days of workshops, roundtable discussions,
technology demos, and social networking sessions. This is the Web 2.0 of
conferences — the session content will be decided entirely by YOU, so bring a
topic of debate, a project to show off, a design for feedback, or any other idea
to share with your professional community!Registration is now open: http://asistpnw.org/infocamp2007

Nov 10 - Judging Day for this year's STC-PSC Competition

Update on recent events

2007-09-11T07:51:00.000-07:00

Update on latest events with me:

Finished reviewing the book User-centered Design Stories: Real-World UCD Case Studies. My review will be in an upcoming Technical Communication journal issue (in the Book Reviews section at the back of the journal). In a nutshell, I recommended the book but had some reservations about the quality of the proofreading.
Went to So. Dakota to visit family and de-stress. I don't understand people who let their vacation days from work lapse and go unused; to me, a recharge is definitely necessary every few months.
Saw that the Puget Sound competition is having a deadline that is later than a lot of other competitions, so if you miss the deadline to enter your own competition, you can probably read the rules and verify that entering the Puget Sound competition (even if you're not an STC member and even if you are not from the Seattle area, you can still enter). To see the deadline and links to other: http://stc.org/comp/competitionOnline01.asp
Glad to see that Tom intends to do more techwritervoices.com podcasts this fall.
I've been continuing to enjoy the Don't Call Me Tina blog posts; I read those via my Google Reader on my cell phone.
I'm a little behind on reading Tech Comm and Intercom again, so I need to do that again in the coming weeks.
I had a stack of books from the library, but then I got an XML book and Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) book in the mail to review for the Tech Comm journal again, so I will be reading those before the library books.
I applied to an evening Master's program to get a degree in Professional Accounting (MPA degree), so we'll see if I get accepted. If I do, I'll start this Winter, hopefully. I had started to do an online degree (MBA) a few years ago, but the quality of the online education was nothing much more than reading the textbook, so I stopped. A return to classroom-based education will be better, plus the coursework for the MBA didn't apply to my job as much as an accounting degree will, so I will be able to retain the material better this time around; I can always do an MBA in 10 years from now or something, or maybe an HCI degree 10 years from now instead.
I have been learning a little more about APIs and mashups by reading the ProgrammableWeb.com website. This will help with keeping my skills up in relation to SDK documentation and other technical topics.

I hope to post better posts in the coming weeks now that I'm back from vacation.

Books update and STC competition reminder

2007-08-18T07:08:00.000-07:00

I was busy the past month reading User-Centered Design Stories: Real-World UCD Case Studies by Carol Righi and Janice James (Morgan Kaufmann Series in Interactive Technologies). I just submitted by book review of it to the Technical Communication journal book review editor, Avon Murphy, so my review of the book should come out soon in an upcoming issue of the journal. If you have any interest in reviewing books for the journal, contact me (email address in the blue header of my blog) and I'll send you Avon's email address; it's a great way to get to read and keep a few great books in our field every year, plus it forces you to read books in the field rather than just wanting to read books in the field year after year.

While I was reading the UCD book, I stopped reserving books On Hold at the library, but now I'm finished and about to go on vacation, so I reserved some more (see the pic). The books are The Traveler's Gift (bottom in pic), Oracle Bones, Ruby on Rails for Dummies, My 'Dam Life, Kartography, Bento Box in the Heartland, Broken Verses, Beautiful Evidence, and The Known World (top in pic).

Oracle Bones is about China's past and present. The Ruby on Rails book is to educate myself because I keep hearing the programming language mentioned as part of Web 2.0, so while I was browsing in the computer book section at the library, I saw it and grabbed it because it was kind of annoying to me to be so clueless about it. My 'Dam Life is just a funny book about someone who lived in Amsterdam, The Netherlands, for three years, and since I now work with people from Denmark and there were no books about Denmark on the shelf in the travel section, I went for something somewhat close.

The next three books are about Pakistan and a Japanese woman. The Pakistan book, Broken Verses, was something that I heard about on NPR's interesting coverage about Pakistan's anniversary this past week on my drives into work, so I wanted to check that out (the library didn't have the other book that NPR talked about, The Reluctant Fundamentalist, so I'll read that one this fall--also, not seen in the picture, but The Kite Runner is also on my list. Then, the next in the pic is Edward Tufte's Beautiful Evidence book. If I remember right, this got a glowing review in the Technical Communication journal, so I was pleasantly surprised that my library had the book available. I really want to read the API Documentation book that also got a good review in Technical Communication, but my library didn't have it, so I need to either use the other library system in my region, fill out a request form to get my library to hopefully buy it, or just purchase it myself.

So Tom is moving soon. That is great news. I really enjoyed his "what I've accomplished in the last three years" post. He needs to post about his plans for TechWriterVoices because that seems to have been pretty quiet this summer, which is fitting because most STC chapters are quiet in the summer, too. I really haven't been loading podcasts up since I got my new Verizon phone (that is what took the pic of the stack of books) because now I can play on-demand videos of Letterman's Top Ten lists, Leno's headlines and monologues, Katie Couric news feature stories, ESPN, and more and not have to load an iPod every few days, but this winter I will likely jog more again, so having the iPod loaded with interesting stuff again would be good. But I was noticing that I actually wanted to listen to NPR on my commutes to and from home so that I could get back in touch with the world after a day at work.

As someone who has been involved in numerous STC Competitions over the years, heads-up that if you plan to submit an entry, late August and September are the times to start getting your entry ready because most competitions have late September or October submission deadlines. Also, if your area isn't have a competition, most other chapters' competitions allow submissions from outside of their chapters, so you can submit your entry elsewhere. If you get good judges, the pages of feedback will be well worth the submission fee.

On a final note, one of the best technical communicators I know, Lucas Rooney, is getting married today, so congratulations to him.

Article talks about upcoming tech trends: F-sharp, multicore chips, and more

2007-07-30T07:43:00.000-07:00

Even though this article (link to full WSJ text below) is about Craig Mundie's work at Microsoft, upcoming tech trends are sprinkled throughout the article (F-sharp programming language, multicore chips, Microsoft heading more toward health care and education):
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB118575380139081784.html?mod=googlenews_wsj

As technical communicators, I think that if you are well-read, you can hear about trends early and then start early to get yourself ready to accept those changes (without dragging your feet when the time comes, which I mention in respect to Tom's good post about rapidly changing technologies).

I also really liked the following article about how chat support is now a favorite way to get support (versus phone support or searching KnowledgeBase articles). Sorry that I don't have a link, but the article does a great job of talking about how companies know that they can save money if more people would visit their Support forum and take more of a do-it-yourself approach, but the companies are realizing that once their customers get to their forum or Knowledgebase support page, the content isn't always overly helpful (or there are too many Search results or too much browsing for materials). Due to this, more companies are offering a Chat Live feature to help those do-it-yourself people; results are showing that customer satisfaction with these live chats is high and people are getting answers to their questions on the first try. This article made me think that technical writers would definitely be good implementation team members if a company were to implement an initiative to try and get the do-it-yourself experience to be a good one

Business Solutions; Help Yourself: Companies try to make the Web an
alternative to phone supportMichael Totty. Wall Street Journal (Eastern
edition). New York, N.Y.: Jul 30, 2007. p. R.5

Diversion for today - fun t-shirts as a good gift idea

2007-07-28T16:01:00.000-07:00

Summer diversion for today's blog - look at funny t-shirts below (source: http://www.palmercash.com/):

Book review gems from the May 2007 Tech Comm journal, and note about Programmer Writers

2007-07-20T07:41:00.000-07:00

I finally got around to reading the Book Reviews section of the May 2007 Technical Communication (the Journal of the STC), and here are the books that I will likely read this fall and winter:

Documenting APIs: Writing Developer Documentation for Java APIs and
SDKs by James F. Bisso and Victoria Maki. 2006. Richmond, CA: Bitzone.
[ISBN 978-0-9630021-0-5. 316 pages, including index. $49.95 USD (softcover).]

e-Learning by Design by William Horton. 2006. San
Francisco, CA: Pfeiffer. [ISBN 978-0-7879-8425-0. 596 pages, including index.
$50.00 USD (softcover).]

Introduction to DITA: A User Guide to the Darwin
Information Typing Architecture by Jennifer Linton and Kylene Bruski.2006.
Denver, CO: Comtech Services, Inc. [ISBN 978-0-9778634-0-2. 323 pages, including
index. $50.00 USD (softcover).]

Social Learning in Technological Innovation: Experimenting with Information
and Communication Technologies by Robin Williams, James Stewart, and Roger
Slack. 2005. Cheltenham, UK; Northampton, MA: Edward Elgar Publishing.
[ISBN 78-1-84376-729-9. 270 pages, including index. $110.00 USD.]

Beautiful Evidence by Edward R. Tufte. 2006. Cheshire, CT:
Graphics Press. [ISBN 978-0-9613921-7-8. 214 pages, including index. $52.00
USD.]

Notice that the Horton book seems to be a valuable update on previous works, as does the Edward Tufte. In reading the review of the Tufte book, the reviewer seems to have a good observation that the criticisms of PowerPoint that Tufte provides in the book seem to drag on a long time, but if you plan to do a PowerPoint presentation in the coming year or two, a refresher of the pitfalls of PowerPoint would probably be great to read.

I thought that the social learning book looked like something that will be neat to synthesize with the book that I read a few years ago called The Social Life of Information. The book about APIs will likely prove a great read as I seek to beef up my technical skills in the coming year, and the book about DITA is simply an essential read to keep up with the XML framework that is widely used in technical communication departments.

If you have a highly technical background, you probably should read the API book (although in the review, the reviewer seemed to point out that the book offers a lot of elementary advice, such as "be organized", so more experienced writers will easily be able to skim over that stuff). I know that in the Seattle area, Programmer Writers are in high demand from the outsourcing companies (Sakson & Taylor - an Aquent company and Volt are the primary outsourcing companies--they place writers at other work sites to complete per-project work).

Word 2007 quick access toolbar is a must for technical communicators

2007-07-12T07:17:00.000-07:00

I thought that I had posted about Word 2007 once before, but in searching my blog, it looks as though I never did. I have been using it for a few months now, and here are my tips:

The single most important thing for technical communicators to do as soon as they install Word 2007 is to customize their Quick Access Toolbar. As this How-to site states, simply right-click in the open area next to the menu bar (for example, in the area to the right of the Add-ins menu) and then select "Customize Quick Access Toolbar." Then, use the arrows to add items to your quick access toolbar. For technical communicators, you will likely definitely want the Style item. I also added the following items: Save, New Comment, Track Changes, Accept and Move to Next, Spelling & Grammer, Text Highlight Color, and Print (and Style, as I previously mentioned). Thanks to my friend, Lucas, for teaching me about the Quick Access toolbar. Image below of what my Quick Access Toolbar looks like:

The Quick Access toolbar remains on the top regardless of your context, so even when the ribbon changes because of context, your buttons are always handy.

In my personal opinion, I like Word 2007 better than previous versions because I like the mini-popup toolbar that appears after you highlight words in the body of the text (time-saver). In small ways, I have noticed that working in Word 2007 saves me time. My other personal thought is that it is a smooth transition if you simply remember to right-click a lot; the menus available when right-clicking have nearly always contained what I needed. Plus, all your shortcuts (such as Ctrl+C, Ctrl+V) still all work the same, which is great.

Thanks to Holly for posting about Word 2007, which reminded me to post about my quick access toolbar. Her blog and Tom's are must-reads.

Jared Spool to speak in Seattle on July 10 (free event)

2007-07-09T07:04:00.000-07:00

The following came to my Inbox from the Puget Sound SIGCHI group:

Subject: (event) 7/10 SIGCHI meeting - Jared Spool on "The dawning of the age of experience" in Seattle

The dawning of the age of experience
presented by Jared M. Spool, User Interface Engineering, Founding Principal.

Experience design is no longer a nice-to-have luxury of a few
organizations with tons of money and exceptional visionary management.
It's become commonplace for organizations that build products and web
sites. Experience Design is a centerpiece of
boardroom discussions and quickly becoming a key performance indicator
for many businesses.

However, you can't just hire a couple of "experience designers" and
tell them, "Go do that voodoo that you do so well." Today's business
environment forces us to build multi-disciplinary teams, compiling a
diverse group of skills and experiences to handle the many facets of
the technical, business, and user requirements.

In his usual entertaining and insightful manner, Jared will talk about
what it takes to build a design team that meets today's needs.

He'll demonstrate how successful Experience Design:

+ Must integrate the needs of the users with the requirements of the business
+ Is learned, but not available through introspection
+ Must be invisible to succeed
+ Is cultural
+ Is multi-disciplinary
+ Thrives best in an "educate and administrate" environment

You'll see examples of designs from Apple's iPod, Netflix, the Mayo
Clinic, and Southwest Airlines, to name a few.

What: The July Meeting of ACM Puget Sound SigChi
Date: This Tuesday, July 10th
Location: The Boardroom in the One Union Square Building, Seattle

No registration is required for this free meeting of interested
professionals.

Networking starts at 6 pm, with the presentation at 7 pm. Job
announcements will follow.

SIGCHI June 2007 meeting notes

2007-06-29T07:51:00.000-07:00

I attended the Puget Sound SIGCHI chapter meeting last night, where Monty Hammontree, Director of User Experience with the Microsoft Developer Division, presented. Here are my notes (presentation description is on my blog):

The great thing about Hammontree is how incredibly well-read he is. He's a seasoned veteran in the field who has been reading and observing the field for decades. But he's not just a sponge when he reads--he works hard to synthesize different HCI authors' works, which makes for a wonderful presentation.

The talk was about what distinguishes Design Thinking from Engineering Thinking and Business Thinking. Hammontree seems to believe that the primary thing is that the design-minded person will explore something and then throw it away--and then repeat that many times over. The Engineer person is more likely to want to create something, get it right, have a repeatable process so that throwing away in the future won't be necessary. The Business person is more interested in surveying the market, bringing back stats on what people say they'll buy, and so on. The designer wants to create, explore, iterate, throw away the iterations, keep exploring, and have breakthroughs (idea breakthroughs) in the process.

Hammontree is passionate about the user experience. He reminds me of someone who works at a Design firm--someone who surrounds himself with great people and great ideas...someone who is passionate about his work everyday.

Highly recommends the book "Universal Principles of Design" (if you only have time for one book, this is the book).

Feels that designers, more than others, can learn a lot through storytelling. Fewer rigid processes and more stories and messy desks.

Recommends the book "Art of Innovation."

Recommends the book "Contextual Design," but recommends that you read it correctly: don't simply read it as the authority and guidebook on how to do things and then put on a straightjacket and only do those things; read the book to gain nuggets of good ways to do things but then continue to do things in a free/open fashion to suit the project (you can use a different design process depending on the project).

Next SIGCHI mtg is this Thursday

2007-06-23T07:21:00.000-07:00

The following came to my Inbox from the Puget Sound (Seattle) SIGCHI (Special-Interest Group in Computer-Human Interaction)--the meeting this Thursday looks very good:

Title: Observation-Driven Innovation, 6/28 Puget Sound SIGCHI meeting, Bellevue Community College

Monty Hammontree, Director of User Experience with the Microsoft Developer Division, will present.

No registration is required for this free meeting of UX professionals.

Description
“Design thinking” versus “engineering thinking” versus “business thinking” have been widely discussed in BusinessWeek and other popular forums as representing different root perspectives that academic institutions and corporate entities take toward product conception and development. The modern pundits of “design thinking” — whether they be from Stanford’s D-School or the IIT Institute of Design — all identify the observation of people in the “real-world” as the cornerstone of product inspiration and refinement.

In this talk, Monty will outline many of the common perspectives, patterns, principles, and practices of “human-centered innovation” that these and other “design thinking” pundits espouse. In addition, he will highlight some of the ways in which “design thinking” is playing a vital role in product conception and development at Microsoft.

Location: Bellevue Community College, National Workforce Center for Emerging Technologies (NWCET) Room N201 - The NWCET is on the south side of the main Bellevue campus, 3000 Landerholm Circle SE, Bellevue WA. See map (top left corner) at http://bellevuecollege.edu/about/around/directions/maps/main-office.asp - Networking starts at 6 pm, with the presentation at 7 pm. Job announcements will follow.

Bio
A primary thread throughout Monty’s career is developing and using team-based techniques for uncovering innovation opportunities, exploring creative concepts, visualizing solution alternatives, and evaluating/refining candidate solutions.

Monty is currently serving as the Director of User Experience for Microsoft’s developer tools division, with product line responsibilities for Visual Studio, Visual Studio Team System, .Net, ASP.Net, Silverlight, and Expression Suite. He has more than 15 years of industry experience in product design and usability management. Prior to joining Microsoft (in October of 2001) Monty co-founded and served as Vice President of User Experiences for ChannelPoint (an Internet startup focused on the sale and management of insurance and financial services products). Before that, he spent 5 years with Sun Microsystems managing product design and usability. Monty holds a Ph.D. in Human Factors Engineering from Old Dominion University.

-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Puget Sound Special Interest Group on Computer-Human Interaction (SIGCHI) is a non-profit, local SIG chapter of the Association of Computing Machinery serving the Puget Sound region's interface design, usability, and research communities.

http://www.pssigchi.org

Puget Sound SIGCHI encourages people interested in user-centered design and usability to join us ($20 yearly dues). Details at http://www.acm.org/chapters/pssigchi/html/membership.html

Help Embedded in Error Messages and Industry Knowledge Tip

2007-06-23T06:40:00.000-07:00

Lately, I've been thinking that technical writers don't do enough to embed Help into error messages. Below are my suggestions for helping the user by being purposeful about error messages:

First, if you don't currently work with the Developer group to suggest better error text verbiage, you need to talk to the Dev group to start doing it.
Every time you get an error message while working in your organization's software application, do a screenshot of it (or simply log th text) and create a two-column file: one column that shows the error message and the other column to show what you did to fix it (also, note somewhere what you clicked or did to receive the message).

After about a year, this resource that you created--perhaps as a side project--could become something to publish to your Web site, on the Support page, or internally for internal users. If you publish it externally, be sure to realize that you likely have Administrator rights in your application, so the solution to fix a problem in a error message might need to be qualified, stating that the fix should only be performed by an advanced user because of permissions or because the fix has severe implications for enterprise-wide processes.

If you publish an HTML page or other HTML guide that has the error messages written out, a search engine will be able to detect that, and then your users who type the exact text of the error message (as well as the software product name) will likely be able to stumble upon your guide and resolve their issue. My suggestion here has a Support Center feel to it, so perhaps you work with your Support department, but the point is that I don't know how many times I've typed in an exact error message into Google to try and see if someone else in the world has received that error and what they did to resolve it. In my opinion, we, as technical communicators can play a big role in ensuring our verbiage appears on that search results page. I think it would be kind of nice to have an error message appendix-type book at the bottom of the Help's Table of Contents that lists each error message and a possible solution, but the important thing is to publish those "error message helper blurbs" to the Internet so that your tips are on the first page of the search engine's results page. Then, track hits to that page and provide a Send Feedback link so that you can report back to your company about any success story, if there is one.
Check into providing a "More information" link at the end of error messages where you can link to one of your Help topics, if you know that you have a Help topic related to what the user was doing when they received the error message (when I was at the DocTrain conference in Vancouver, BC, I think I saw an example of this with Web application error messages).
At a minimum, provide your services to clean up the text in error messages so that users can clearly understand the problem and then clearly see the solution to resolve the problem.

These examples of providing Help in error messages move technical writers beyond "manual writers," which is important for future employability (I agree with Holly Harkness that a "manual-less existence is a long way off"--Holly's blog is my new favorite, by the way--but it's never too early to start exploring ways to reinvent your contributions).

Finally, a couple of other notes: last week, I finished the book Not Buying It: My Year Without Shopping. On a scale of 1-10 with 10 being best, I rate it about a 6. It's worth your time because the author does a lot of reflecting about the role of consuming in our lives, which makes for great content. There are other parts of the book where you'll likely wish that an editor had shortened the book's length a bit. I also read a book called The Wetfeet Insider Guide to Careers in Accounting. If you're thinking of getting a Master's degree in the field that your users are in, these Wetfeet guidebooks can help you immerse yourself more in your users' world.

On that same note, I've been reflecting lately that more tech writers could probably benefit from simply taking a trip over to their library's stacks (or to the library's Information Desk or to the online catalog search page) and browsing for books in their users' field. I did that last week and found a couple of great gems: I've checked out an Advanced Accounting textbook that was just sitting on the shelf and it's proving to be a great foundation--I am kicking myself for not doing this many years ago. Next, I plan to graduate to magazines, trade journals, and professional organization Web pages to keep up with the trends/topics that build on the foundation from the textbook.

One final note, even though Rob Houser's and Scott DeLoach's User First Services has now split into two entities, and they plan to remove the userfirst.net Web site at the end of 2007, if you are doing Help for a Web application, they have a don't miss Web page about that: http://www.userfirst.net/tips1.html.

Idea: Add blogs from your industry to your feed reader

2007-06-14T07:23:00.000-07:00

Quick update from my weekend: I did end up catching up on every Intercom issue that has been released this year. I just have the e-Membership option, so I enter my username/password on their Web site and just cruised through the online versions of the articles. Like I said on the podcast that Tom and I recorded on Tuesday night and that Tom posted today on techwritervoices.com, the four stand-out articles for me were the following:

Kicking and Screaming: Modernizing Today’s Help Systems by Goldberg and Nightingale, June 2007 issue of Intercom - Your users are using Google to search for answers to questions about your Help…what are you doing to have content turn up on the first couple of pages when they perform their search? Also, Help on a server to track search queries and track Web site paths.
Protecting Yourself from Offshoring: Advice for U.S.-based Technical Communicators by Michelle Murphy, Member, Feb 2007 issue of Intercom - Key take-away is that the lifelong learners are the ones who will continue on at their organizations.
E-Learning Trends in China By: James Johnston May 2007 - There are few articles in Intercom that are really well-researched and provide statistics, but this article does a great job of that, which is one reason it was my favorite article so far this year. Just a great read.
A New Model for Help Authoring, Part II: Input By: Neil E. Perlin, Associate Fellow, April 2007, Discusses User-Supplied content and the tech communicator’s role in that.

Also, from my weekend, I did end up plugging every tech writer blog into a feedreader. I selected Google's feed reader for no particular reason other than they often use Ajax in their Web apps, which I think greatly helps Web user experiences. I do really like their reader because it gives you the number of unread feeds that you have, aggregates them into one long, scrollable page, and then as you scroll down the page it marks each post as "read" automatically and subtracts it from the number of reads you still have left to read. It also lists each feed individually so that you can read only one feed instead of the aggregated page if desired. It also has the standard "Mark All as Read" button so that you can click it and not feel overwhelmed or "behind." I noticed with the reader that I added some world newspapers, so I feel more in touch with the rest of the world now. I also added some blogs from the industry that I write Help for (accounting), so that I can better keep up with trends that my users are keeping up with.

Finally, just this morning, I saw a Wall Street Journal article that goes along well with the "poster" of mobile phone parties involved with one another (the poster that was presented at the May STC chapter meeting at the Univ of Washington): A Fight Over Cellphone Features - A turf war is looming between wireless phone carriers and the makers of hand-held gadgets. Each camp wants to control new services such as video, games, and maps, and the gusher of revenue they could produce.

One last note, if you live in the Seattle area or want to watch an on-demand video online, there is a UWTV program this weekend that looks quite good. Below is the description that UWTV created and sent to my inbox:

The Changing Dynamics of U.S.-Japan Relations Date (series).
June 16, 2007, 10 p.m. PT Daniel Inouye, a senior member of the U.S. Senate
(D-Hawaii), examines the changing dynamics between the United States and Japan
in “The Evolving Relationship Between the United States and
Japan .” Learn about the historical relationship between these two
countries, and what to expect in the future. Inouye is known for his
distinguished record as a legislative leader and as a World War II combat
veteran who earned the nation’s highest award for military valor, the Medal of
Honor.

Books I've read in 2007 - update

2007-06-08T17:44:00.000-07:00

I finally updated my sidebar on my blog to include the books that I've read in 2007 now. In case you're reading this post in a feedreader and don't want to go to the site, here are the books that I added to the sidebar:

The Audacity of Hope
The Rice Mother
The Torrents of Spring
The Money Book for the Young, Fabulous & Broke
First Look 2007 Office
Secrets of RSS
Slow is Beautiful
In Praise of Slowness
Conservatize Me
A couple of accounting books that I can't remember the titles of now

Also, I have a few books on hold that I plan to read in the coming months, which are the following:

Bold spirit
Women & money
Deep economy
Con$umed
River town: Two Years on the Yangtze
Not buying it: My Year Without Shopping
Oracle bones: A Journey Between China's Past and Present
The Old Curiosity Shop
The Traveler's Gift
The Known World
Bento Box in the Heartland

I've been enjoying The Rice Mother and Audacity of Hope books so much lately that I haven't read the latest Intercom articles nor Technical Communication journal articles, so I hope to catch up on those this weekend. By the way, if you read The World is Flat by Friedman, you'd also like The Audacity of Hope by Obama because they have a similar feel to them (that was my thought last night as I was reading it).

I also haven't loaded up the myYahoo feedreader or some other online feedreader with the 200+ feeds that Tom likes to sift through, so that's another thing that I want to get going with this weekend. It would be nice to pop down one page of RSS feed topic titles at the end of each day and keep up with the ones that were updated. I also wouldn't mind picking back up with the Wrox's ASP.NET 2.0 Visual Web Developer 2005 Express Edition Starter Kit book that I have at home, but I think I'd rather finish The Audacity of Hope book first.

Online Portfolio Idea - Great example

2007-06-01T07:23:00.000-07:00

Although this Wall Street Journal ad campaign isn't a direct example of an online portfolio, you could easily get ideas for doing your own portfolio from it. The WSJ ad campaign is called Journey. You'll appreciate the Flash animation that is done in a professional way, rather than in an annoying way. If someone were to interview with me and had this type of online portfolio, they would definitely stand out: http://journey.wsj.com/
This also goes along with Tom Johnson's recent post about how to break into the Technical Communication field. If you whip up a portfolio similar to these Journey ad profiles at the above link, you quickly show your Web skills, design skills, and writing skills to your potential employer (as well as showing that you have the dedication to spend time creating something like this, as well as showing patience and professionalism).
Also, I went to the SIGCHI meeting last week--the one with the Boeing presenter. Here are the primary take-aways:

When Boeing creates software in-house or uses an outside vendor, the presenter, Jennifer Duncan, seemed to say that they now factor the usability of the software into their exploratory/evaluation report during the RFP (Request for Proposals) process, procurement, or up-front planning process. Just as team leaders have to report about the software's potential cost, cost savings, user-install base, features, time savings, ROI (return on investment), and hardware, they also have to rate the software's usability to upper management.
The Boeing UX (user experience) team that Duncan is on is small (not the Human Factors team for the general hardware of airplanes, but the UX team in the IT division that focuses on software), but they make up for their numbers by posting Best Practices to the intranet site and encouraging all teams to refer to the guidelines as they start projects, making sure to use the practices at certain project stages.
The UX Team made sure that the new IT Process for creating in-house software has usability requirements. For example, when a new Project Manager reviews the process that they must follow for software development, they now see certain steps in the process where they are required to write personas, review a usability checklist to ensure their project meets usability best practices (wireframes / sketches that users look at or that the team agrees would be usable, and so on), and performs usability tests in cases when the project is large. When Project Managers who are into usability see these guidelines, they now feel as though they have a voice for requiring it from their team, rather than simply hoping that the team will build usable software.
The UX Team came up with a list of usability deliverables that the project teams could do on their own without the need to use the services of the more professionally trained UX Team. It is a gray area about what teams can perform on their own, but the UX Team is so small that they only have the capacity to do lab usability tests or remote tests for their internal clients. They perform the formal usability tests as their main deliverable, but they also do a lot of advising for their internal clients--they offer advice and then direct the clients to the resources already available to them on the intranet site.

-Heidi, June 1, 2007

Heidi Hansen's blog

Top 10 Mistakes UX Designers Make

Trends in Technical Communication

60 Minutes Segment about Prodigy Jake=inspiring

Books Read Update

Don Norman article about why human-centered design is harmful and activity-based design is better

To-do list before Feb

My Twitter page

Seattle Girl Geek Dinner #13

Up to lately - random comments

Books read over the years

Notes from David Farkas, PhD, about Troubleshooting type help topics

Some links to Wired and Fast Company that I liked

Outlook for CPAs is encouraging

Upcoming books that I'll be reading

Room to Read is a great charity where almost nothing goes to Admin costs

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Life after Gates, Microsoft trends, Microsoft Help v3, and random thoughts related to writersUA

Accounting textbooks and general update

A Week Off from Accounting Master's degree so I am Back to Blogging

SIGCHI and STC upcoming event descriptions, plus an update blurb

Weekly update 4

Weekly update 3

Weekly Update 2 - video recording, books on reserve, classes to take

Weekly Short Update 1

Hodge-podge post of movie recommendations, reading lately list, Malcolm Gladwell Outliers book interview observations

Getting into the giving spirit

How to fix Word if you want two windows but everything opens in one, plus my thoughts about Android

Random updates, reading lately list, and pix messages

Seattle job scene for technical writers

Puget Sound STC is having a non-Competition this month (so get your Help peer reviewed and join in the Seattle technical writing community)

Thoughts on DITA XML authoring and Ginny Redish

New look for my blog

How I write Help for a topic-based help system

Friendfeed and other Web 2.0 news

My Story of Taking Online Courses versus Classroom courses

Audio of 5 books that I read is online

Reluctant to start a blog? Don't be

Random Update

Web 2.0 applications for technical communicators: notes from Scott Boggan May Seattle STC meeting

Easy way to keep up on technical writing trends: attend a local chapter meeting about Ajax, RSS, and other Web 2.0 technologies

Is Technical Communication being threatened by the new Office Community Clips site?

Todd Wilkens of Adaptive Path presented at SIGCHI

Ginny Redish to speak in Seattle next Tuesday, links to UX Track at Mix08, and more

Tax textbook and Manu's Imagination Challenge book

Usability meeting and favorite WritersUA sessions

Feb 2008 recap

Great user experience designs that don't require manuals

SIGCHI presentation notes, Jake Knapp, Google UI Designer, Feb 2008

SIGCHI meeting in Seattle tonight, topic is Google projects

Sessions that I plan to attend in a few weeks at WritersUA

Recommended tech comm articles and how to read them for free

January 2008 recap

STC Puget Sound competition 2008 showcase notes

View an example of a self-published book, done with Lulu

STC Competition Showcase meeting preview, database class update, and other updates

USPS self-service kiosk has good usability

My book list for 2008 and a visual book recap of 07 and 06

Heidi's Year 2007 - a recap

Great example of usability

Art trip, film recommendation, accounting degree

What I think technical writers should contribute to

Mossberg and Pogue give usability feedback

Added a tag cloud and tag list to my blog

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AmazonKindle: my two cents

1117071021.jpg - artisan show and bloggers to read

STC Nov07 meeting notes and random thoughts

1111071003.jpg - world usability day comment

TC and HCI articles and research databases at your fingertips

Easy way to keep up with tech comm trends

Professional XML book read

How Flickr does their Help

0908071556.jpg - moblogging

World Usability Day is November 8

Steve Krug Sigchi Oct 07 meeting notes

How to read the Wall Street Journal for free

Steve Krug UX professional meeting preview

BusinessWeek article about user friendliness

Quick update