The Humane Experience

In Defense of a Populist Grammar-- My blog today will not be popular with most of my audience (ironically, given its title). I invite all wh...

In Memoriam-- I normally refrain from using this blog for personal ramblings, but this morning's news announced what is a deep and perso...

It's Aliiiiive!!-- I've recently become sensitive to an apparent fault in my writing: I'm guilty of anthropomorphism, i.e., the ...

Users! They've been around for centuries apparently--- The book

Has Web 2.0 made affordances like so yesterday?-- Granted, the fact that I am 57 years old might be a contributing factor here, but I am se...

Progressive User Adoption (redux)-- I'm in an all-week training session learning how to do contextual design. Very neat stuff, by the wa...

The Rules Are Changing-- Want to get excited again about being a technical communicator? Watch this: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6gmP4nk0...

Progressive User Adoption-- For those who were patient and let me ramble on last month about progressive user adoption, you might want to lo...

Shut Up and Talk-- A colleague sent a clip from an academic website that lists its latest banned words. It reminded me what I don't like...

Instructional Text on the User Interface: Some Counter Intuitive Implications-- User assistance occurs within an action context (the user do...

Instructive Labels-- I should have learned by now not to trust my instincts. Instincts are often the manifestation of programmed learning, w...

Expert Guidance in User Assistance-- Those who read my ramblings in this blog on this topic, can read a more coherent discussion in my artic...

Happy New Year-- And speaking of new year, the theme of the January issue of SIGCHI's magazine, Interactions , is "Help: User assis...

Progressive User Adoption: More thoughts on building an adoption profile-- Before moving off the topic of laying out a suggested progression...

Progressive Adoption Principle 2: Establish an Adoption Profile-- The secret to progressive adoption is to stop thinking of adoption as a Ye...

Principles of Progressive Adoption-- In my last blog entry I introduced the concept of progressive user adoption, moving a user further alon...

Progressive User Adoption-- I'd like to start a series of entries about the role that user assistance can play in what I call progressiv...

Given-New vs. Analogy-- Today's blog is for die-hard writers who get a buzz from talking about rhetoric. No tools or technology today; I...

Gap Analysis-- Sometimes we operate under the false myth that we must write user assistance for the lowest common denominator. I think this ...

Why I'm Not a Technical Writer-- And as Jerry Seinfeld would say, "Not that there'd be anything wrong with that." But I n...