http://www.informationdesign.org/ Dedicated to the growth and improvement of the information experience industries. en-us plato@xs4all.nl 2009-11-25T13:03:49+01:00 hourly 1 2000-01-01T12:00+00:00 "Using any of the standard authoring tools — Flare, RoboHelp, Author-It, Doc-to-Help — leaves you with the ridiculous model of a single author working from a single vantage point from a single organization trying to pull together an ocean of information." (Tom johnson) TechCom 2009-11-25T13:03:49+01:00 "Know-how, checklists, tools and links, which will help you to create user-friendly software documentation such as manuals, online help, software demos and other forms of software user assistance." (Indoition Software User Assistance) TechCom 2009-10-28T09:54:38+01:00 "This site is the home of the Content Strategy SIG (Special Interest Group) of the Society for Technical Communication. (...) Content strategy is an emerging field of practice dealing with the planning aspects of managing content throughout its lifecycle. Strategy includes alignment to business goals, analysis, and modeling, and influences the development, production, presentation, evaluation, measurement, and sunsetting of content, including governance." (About Content Strategy SIG) Content strategy 2009-09-09T11:17:15+01:00 "Single sourcing and its pragmatic flip side, reuse, remind me a bit of the early days of the personal computer. Everybody wanted one, but many weren’t sure what they would do with a computer if they got one. Even among seasoned user assistance architects, single sourcing and reuse remain elusive concepts. I recently heard someone at an STC chapter meeting define single sourcing as producing the same document as both a Help file and as a PDF file. Basically true, but one would hope there is more to it than that." - (Mike Hughes - UXmatters) TechCom 2009-05-26T10:27:11+01:00 "Testing how well people understand a link's first 11 characters shows whether sites write for users, who typically scan rather than read lists of items." - (Jakob Nielsen - Alertbox) Usability 2009-04-06T15:00:04+01:00 "(...) a blog about the intersection of content strategy, pop culture and human behavior. Contributors are all practicing Content Strategists at the offices of Razorfish, an international digital design agency." - (About Content Strategy) TechCom 2009-04-02T11:05:43+01:00 "Many technical communication departments are experiencing flat budgets, meaning they’re getting only small or no increases in headcounts, capital expenses, or training dollars. Worse yet, many departments are facing reductions in these resources. These reductions cause production pressures that are often confounded by increases in development headcount, here or offshore. Since more code equates to more features, which in turn drive greater revenues, companies are more willing to increase development budgets. On the other hand, adding writers increases costs, which in turn reduces margins." (Mike Hughes - UXmatters) TechCom 2008-01-23T11:45:21+01:00 "Conference speakers, Peer Showcase presenters, and Exhibitors are invited to provide additional materials to supplement the detailed information included in the printed Proceedings. Additional items may be added to this page as they become available. (...) The Conference speakers retain all rights to their presentation materials. WritersUA only assumes the right to distribute the comprehensive, printed Proceedings. If you would like copies of presentation slides and they are not listed here, we encourage you to request them from the individual speakers. Most speakers have provided their email address in the printed Proceedings." (WritersUA) TechCom 2008-01-10T09:15:12+01:00 "If this column's title sounds familiar to you, the bad news is you're getting old, but the good news is your memory hasn't gone yet. It was the title of a presentation I gave at the STC conference in Anaheim ten years ago. However, many of the points I made in that talk are still relevant to user assistance today, so I would like to update some of them and offer some new thoughts as well." (Mike Hughes - UXmatters) TechCom 2007-11-21T10:41:26+01:00 "User assistance occurs within an action context—the user doing something with an application - and should appear in close proximity to the focus of that action - that is, the application it supports. The optimal placement of user assistance, space permitting, is in the user interface itself. We typically call that kind of user assistance instructional text." (Mike Hughes - UXmatters) TechCom 2007-03-09T12:07:39+01:00 "It's hard to remember now just how different this community was ten years ago. There were only a few hundred SGML experts in the world, a goodly number of whom came to this conference every year. Very few groups in existence today could boast the level of intelligence, the breadth of interest, and the depth of independence, not to say downright weirdness, evidenced by the SGML community of a decade past." (XML 2006 Proceedings) - courtesy of timoreilly TechCom 2007-01-13T15:47:43+01:00 "This article explores the role of user assistance in providing domain-centric online Help - rather than Help that simply explains obvious user interactions with well-designed user interfaces - and provides a pattern for and examples of expert guidance." (Mike Hughes - UXmatters) TechCom 2007-01-10T09:06:16+01:00 "We usually assume that documentation is used after a product has been purchased, as part of the process of learning or setting it up. But these are all examples documentation as part of the purchasing-decision process, looking for information beyond the lists of features or simple technical specifications on data sheets." (Whitney Quesenbery - UXmatters) TechCom 2006-08-20T10:25:33+01:00 "This exclusive and informative top ten list is based on interviews with technical writers at more than 20 software companies - tech writers that are actually using DITA to create documentation today. It's jam-packed with useful advice, practical tips, honest warnings, and lessons learned." (The Content Wrangler) TechCom 2006-08-10T07:38:45+01:00 "The Minimalist theory of J.M. Carroll is a framework for the design of instruction, especially training materials for computer users. The theory suggests that (1) all learning tasks should be meaningful and self-contained activities, (2) learners should be given realistic projects as quickly as possible, (3) instruction should permit self-directed reasoning and improvising by increasing the number of active learning activities, (4) training materials and activities should provide for error recognition and recovery and, (5) there should be a close linkage between the training and actual system." (Martin Ryder) TechCom 2006-06-18T13:37:42+01:00