Lost in Space(s)

The APA has returned to its requirement that two spaces follow a period. See the first bullet in Chapter 4 in the Chapter-by-Chapter section or their "What's New" page.

The technoscribe blog-o-sphere is a twitter!

Those who have insisted on keeping two spaces in spite of the fact that ALL modern word processing technology accommodates the necessary spacing, take heart. Once again you are right.

Those currently getting therapy from a psychologist take warning--those who direct and publish the research of that practice are apparently still doing their work on typewriters. Expect the following edgy articles to be showing up in their journals:

• "The Steam Engine: Advance or Anxiety?"
• "Being Gay in America: The Role of Happiness in a Modern Culture"
• "Media Overload: Do We Really Need All Three Channels?"
  

Time for a new look

Some days a blogger just needs to feel pretty. Seems I'm into changes these days. My wife and I went to the movies this weekend. You need to understand how my wife and I go to the movies. We go and leave together, but rarely actually sit in the same showing. She saw "The Ugly Truth" [chick flick] and I saw Public Enemy (Johnny Depp with a way-cool scar on his face; did I mention I have a scar on my face?). Hers started about 30 minutes before mine so I hung out in the mall for a little before going in. Walking around, I saw it, the perfect hat--kinda a mix between a pork pie, a fedora, and a golfer's hat. Of course, they had the brim all wrong, but I was able to rework that (turned up all around). I bought it and sat in my theater feeling its soothing karma settle over me as if it were a wet towel wrapped around my head on a hot day. I've started growing my goatee back with a thin mustache (gratis to some skin cancer surgery this winter) and I was feeling "edgy." Well, my wife came into my show after hers let out and looked for me. She sat down next to me, looked at the hat, and all I got out of her was "I left you alone for twenty minutes."

I'm celebrating by changing the color scheme of my blog site. For those of you wondering what life is like when you reach 60; this is it.

G2G

A genre of technical writing that doesn't get a lot of attention is Geek-to-Geek (G2G). In that genre, highly technical people are communicating to other highly technical people. Most of the discussions in technical communication deal with transferring technical knowledge from experts to the average Joe.

Professional technical communicators need to be very careful when inserting themselves into G2G scenarios. Some examples:

• I had an intern once work on a specification document our engineering group had written so that customer IT folks could configure their applications to exchange data with our application. She took out the word "argument" everywhere it occurred because it sounded confrontational.
• I had a layout/graphics designer make a training manual I had written more "user friendly" by changing "120-volt (AC) solenoids" to "120-volt air conditioned solenoids."
• I was reviewing a document a software developer had written that was to be sent to other software developers in the company and found his excessive use of multi-layered indents to be distracting. I was just about to comment on it when another developer looked over my shoulder and said, "Cool, he's using FORTRAN formatting rules; that makes it so much easier for me to follow."

By no means am I saying that professional technical communicators have no role to play in G2G, but I do think our role changes a bit, and I think some of the rules we normally follow need to be modified.

I was recently involved in a G2G situation, and I noticed some differences between that genre and G2J (Geek-to-Joe). A developer in my company had written some documentation about how to use an open standard reporting tool to issue reports from one of our products. The readers would be developers who worked for our customers. Some differences:

• Technical writers (uh, me) like to write in generalities; geeks like specifics. We talk about how to change parameters, they describe how to change a specific parameter.
• Geeks want to show how things work--often describing what goes on under the covers; technical writers don't feel they need to prove the procedure does what we say it does, or even explain why it does. For example, in his discussion of parameters, the developer told the reader to run a specific report, then had the reader change a specific parameter, and then run the report again to see the effect.
  

Seeing how the developer wanted the reader to run a report, make a change, and run the report again reminded me of an experience I had years ago when I was a trainer at Nordson Corporation. Nordson is a company that makes glue applicators for packaging equipment (a hardware environment completely on the opposite end of the spectrum from the software world I now live in, but geeky none-the-less). We had a new product that glued cartons with a "sift-proof" seal--very useful if you're packaging powdered products like laundry detergent. The only problem was that we had only one field technician who seemed to be able to install one of these things correctly. So they sent me into the field with him to learn what he knew and to pass that on through training to the other technicians.

We got on site and the technician got the glue guns and sealing bracket all bolted on. He showed me a bolt that affected alignment of the sealing surfaces and explained: "Here's how I adjust this," and he turned it fully clockwise and ran a carton. The resultant sealing job looked awful. He then turned it fully counter-clockwise and ran a second carton. It too looked awful, but in a different way. He smiled and said, "See, now I know what effect it has, so I can now adjust it." Well he went on in this way through about three other alignment controls and in half an hour had this machine cranking out perfectly sealed cartons.

Hard to put into a training module, but a good insight into how geeks think and work.

Some things to consider when intervening in G2G:

• Geeks need to know underlying principles that will let them predict cause and effect.
• Geeks like examples.

Places we can add value:

• We know how to write instructions.
• We know our company's legal and style requirements.
• We know how to produce and distribute documentation efficiently.

It might feel a little secretarial, in so far as we should give the SME a little more leeway to dictate what information is important, but we still add a lot of value when we help make these G2G documents more "customer-facing."

But don't just roll over and play dead--for example, I took out the parts where we were telling users to run reports to see that changing the parameter really did affect the report--but in G2G, the geeky writer probably understands the geeky user better than we do. Be aware of that and try not to break what could be a perfectly clear explanation by recrafting it for the average Joe, who will never read it.

Cop vs Consultant

As a member of the STC certification task force and a former member of the Body of Knowledge committee, I have been interested for a while in understanding the core value proposition for engaging professional technical communicators. The essential question is "How is a technical communicator better than an engineer who writes well?"

I've read a lot of reports, essays, blogs, and e-mails on this topic. One of the bullet points that got to me was that professional technical communicators understand the legal requirements of documentation. It's not that it didn't make sense, it's just that I have never measured up well in that category. Now that I see it as a differentiator, I'm starting to take it more seriously.

Oh did I mention I work for IBM? I wonder if they care about things like copyrights and trademarks.

The kinda good news is that IBM provides me with a ton of information on my internal employee Intranet about trademarks. The really good news is that they provide a tool that searches my documentation and tags everything that could be trademarked. The tags are read by our output rendering tools and they apply the (tm) and (r) symbols appropriately, as in first use in a topic, not in a title, etc. I just have to do a manual scrub and look for places where their use is not a trademark, as in IBM being used in reference to the company not a product. Trust me, that's a small enough trade off.

It also gives me a tool that looks at all my documentation for word usage and notifies me when I use a term that is not approved or might be used in the wrong way. Most of the suggestions are based on how elegantly certain terms are handled by translators versus other terms with the same meaning.

I mention that as a bit of self-disclosure. I'm preaching that everyone should care about this when probably most already do and many do not have the nifty tool-box my employer has provided me.

But, it's probably worth a mention. Pay attention to the legal requirements and translatability issues, not only in your own documents, but in the documents of other groups like marketing and engineering. It's an area where we add value.

The tough part is doing it without sounding school-marmish (still working on that).

Maybe I'll modify the old "feel, felt, found" approach sales people use to handle objections, as in "I know how you feel; I felt the same way, but then I found..." I'll try "use, used, uncovered".

"I see you use the word following as in '...includes the following:' I used it the same way until I uncovered the fact that most translators will interpret it to mean something like 'group of admirers' when it is used as a noun. I now only use it as an adjective as in '...includes the following features.'"

I know I am trying to move away from my "you're wrong and I must warn the others" syndrome, but sometimes there is value in warning folks when something is wrong.

Teacher vs Educator

Thanks to Marv Jenkins--a great educator-- for passing this along to me.

Lipstick in School (priceless)

According to a news report, a certain private school in Washington was recently faced with a unique problem. A number of 12-year-old girls were beginning to use lipstick and would put it on in the bathroom. That was fine, but after they put on their lipstick, they would press their lips on the mirror leaving dozens of little lip prints. Every night the maintenance man would remove them, and the next day the girls would put them back. Finally the principal decided that something had to be done.

She called all the girls to the bathroom and met them there with the maintenance man. She explained that all these lip prints were causing a major problem for the custodian who had to clean the mirrors every night (you can just imagine all the yawns from the little princesses).

To demonstrate how difficult it had been to clean the mirrors, she asked the maintenance man to show the girls how much effort was required. He took out a long-handled squeegee, dipped it in the toilet, and cleaned the mirror with it.

Since then, there have been no lip prints on the mirror.

There are teachers. . . and then there are educators.

Knee bone connected to ... a new acronym

Some recent thinking about information and media reminded me of a lesson I learned a long time ago during a usability test.

The product was an anatomy software application that presented detailed medical illustrations. There were three primary data bases underlying the product, based on the three types of medical illustrations:

• Layered view (skin on/off, muscles on/off, just the bone, just the veins, etc.)
• Cut -away (as in take a knife and slice it in half)
• Pin-view (as in pull back bits and pieces as if on a dissection table and label the components)

It was a grisly experience, but that's another story.

The user interface was designed around, you guessed it, the three views:

1. Pick a view.
2. Pick a body part.

Want a different view? Navigate up and over and then drill down through the new view to the body part.

Well, it didn't take long for the usability test to show the flaw with that. The user work flow was pick a body part and look at the different views. Classic mistake, user interface was designed to reflect the data structure, not the information needs of the use. Easy fix. (UI fixes usually are.)

Fast forward to today and I see where we can easily make the same mistake regarding information and media on Web sites. Blogs here, professional publications here, academic publications here, forums here, podcasts here.

But users typically do not come into a problem defined around media, as in "I want to see a podcast," "I want to read a blog," or "I wonder what academic research says." They define problems in terms of "I want to know..."

For example, if I want to learn a song, I have to go to YouTube to hear it sung, another Web site to get chords and lyrics, and then often another Web site to get music or tablature. But if my problem is "I want to play Sweet Baby James, wouldn't it be neat to have one place that offered a video of James Taylor singing it, along with links to lyrics, chords and tabs right there? And Google isn't the answer; I'm lazy and want a vetted aggregation. (In other words, I don't want 19 different sets of chords, I want at most two: The ones James Taylor actually uses and maybe a simplied version ala a "fake it" book.

I'm hoping we avoid this misstep with our STC Body of Knowledge and all of the other media we are contemplating. I don't want to go one place for academic articles, another for practitioner insight, and yet another for the social media. Once I say "I want to know about usability," I want the UI to aggregate all the STC assets and present them to me.

I know. SMOCM (pronounced "Smoke 'em"--simple matter of content management)

The Cowboy Way

In case you haven't heard, the economy is tough, and the Society for Technical Communication (STC) is having its challenges--just like a lot of businesses and just plain folk are. Lower attendance at the conference means we did not get as much revenue as we had planned on, membership has been declining, and our investments took the same hits that everybody's 401Ks did. As First VP and member of the board of directors, I have a front row seat to what the cruel calculus of this economy does.

We need to rethink, retool, and reinvent our society to meet the new realities. No shock there, staff and board have been working hard at it for some time. It's just that the economic crisis took away a lot of runway, so we're trying to rev the engines, so to speak, on many changes that need to happen sooner rather than later.

I also have a front row seat to how badly some people act in these kinds of times. I don't think the blame-laying finger pointers realize how counter-productive their negative energy can be. As a volunteer leader finding myself in the middle of circumstances so much bigger than myself, I try to take a mature attitude--shake it off, Mike, stay focused on the solution. Until recently, I've been doing OK at the chin up, stiff upper lip posture.

But I can feel the depression overtaking me and I wonder how others cope. Sarah Palin retires--man, I so get that!

Not the cowboy way, though, and I have to stick to the cowboy way. Shake it off, rub some dirt on it, and stay in the saddle. Do the right thing for no other reason than it's the right thing to do. If I have learned no other lesson about leadership from this, I have learned that.

I'm also learning about followship, and I'm going to try to be more supportive of my leaders, national and business. There is no user guide for this sort of thing (but if there was, it would probably be a PDF buried on the Web someplace--OK my sense of humor is starting to come back a little). They have to make tough decisions, often with not nearly as much data as they'd like. They're stuck with tools and systems they didn't create and that are not ideal for the job. And they can see the solution clearly at times, it's just that they have to move lots of people and entrenched bureaucracies and special interest groups to get there. I'll give them the benefit of the doubt and my support. If I get to the point that I think they are so wrong, I'll quit and go quietly so they can stay focused (in case I'm the one that's wrong).

And in the meantime, if they start moping and feeling sorry for themselves, I'll just tell them to shake it off, rub some dirt on it, and get back in the saddle.

Yippie kay yay!

Collect Underpants

Thanks to Miranda Bennett for posting this on her blog a while back. As I struggle with trying to define what our New Normal for STC will be like, I keep wrestling with Phase Two.

Balsamiq

Shout out to Balsamiq for believing me when I said I had a license but I changed laptops. They sent me a new license (thanks, Val).

Check out their product Balsamiq Mockups. It's a low-fidelity wireframing tool that has an informal hand-drawn look. I have used high fidelity wireframe tools and one of the problems is that people fall too easily into pixel pushing if it looks like it's meant to be a final product.

At any rate, check them out; it's $79 and way cool--and they're way cool!

Online vs. on-line

No this isn't a discussion of hyphenated vs. not hyphenated. It examines the difference between putting a PDF file on the Internet (what I call an on-line document) and having a truly electronic Web presence for that content (what I call an online document). Unfortunately, the two often get bundled together.

I have a UXmatters column called PDF Manuals: The Wrong Paradigm for an Online Experience that highlights my arguments for not putting user manuals on line as PDF files. It deals with the artificial constraints such as page breaks that make no sense in the context of an online experience.

In my blog today, however, I want to focus on other kinds of publications, namely journals and magazines, and the impact of taking them...what? online or on-line.

But first, let's play a mind game. Anybody still remember encyclopedias? What if encyclopedias were bound, NOT alphabetically by topic but by when the articles were written. Is that a better organizational scheme? Not at all! But in essence, isn't that what a collection of journal issues is? With the exception of a few theme issues, the only thing the articles in a volume have in common is their publication date. So if I want to read about Usability, I have to grab a handful of these issues to get to all the articles. Can you imagine trying to read about the Civil War in an encyclopedia and first having to find the volumes that applied--based on when the sections were written?

Because of how journals and magazines were published, this was an artifact of the technology and the processes imposed. It was never a good way to organize content.

OK, so as we go online with the content that has traditionally been in journals or magazines, why would we keep this organizational structure?

Let's take a model I am very familiar with and have a lot of emotional attachment to: Technical Communication and Intercom, the two STC publications. I personally love having them in print for two reasons:

• I like publishing in them and being able to display them on my coffee table--I realized that about myself when I published in the UPA Journal, an on-line journal, and noticed the lack of the "hunter's thrill" in not being able to display my trophy.
• Just having the physical presence of them arriving makes me feel smarter, or at least feel I'm about to get smarter--if I read this issue, and I will, let me just put it here with some other stuff I haven't quite gotten around to reading yet, hmmmm, this one is March 2002, my my time has certainly been flying.

But if I quit thinking about publications for a moment and think instead of knowledge and some realistic contexts of when that knowledge could be useful, journals and magazines just don't seem to be the answer, or their capabilities pale in comparison to what current technologies can do.

OK, let's do the Conan O'Brien thing where we put a flashlight under our chin and someone chants in falsetto "In the year 2000" (Yeah yeah it's well past 2000 but Conan knows a good tag line when he finds one) and see what it would mean to have a truly online (no hyphen) journal and magazine.

I have a question about Usability, maybe a big question like "what is it" or a tiny question like "how do I do a card sort?" I go to the STC Body of Knowledge Portal and enter usability. I'm taken to a web page that has a general overview of what usability is and its place within the practice of Technical Communication. Now I see that I can link to rigorous research articles, practitioner articles, vendor websites, and other websites that deal with usability. I decide to read an article that says it's been peer reviewed and meets the rigor of scholarly research--let's say the abstract associated with the link made me believe it would be of interest to me. I open the article and get a little overwhelmed by some of the research methodology, as in, "Yikes what is an ANOVA?" Wait, a link in the sidebar "Tell me about ANOVA." I take it and get a quick layman's description of what it is and what I should look for as a critical reader. I read the article and it seems to make a lot of sense to me. Wait, here's a comment from a reader that says the literature review missed some important contributions and provides them. Hey! Speaking of literature review, about half of the references at the end of the article have links to the references themselves. And of course, the Amazon.com technique of "Readers who read this article also recommend..." Wow, here's a link to an STC content focus group on usability. Let me check into that as well.

Suddenly, I'm missing my journal and my magazine less. I know as an author, I will not be able to put my contribution on the coffee table and I would be lying through my teeth to say I will not miss that. But publishing should never be about pleasing the author, it should be about serving the reader.

I know as a reader, I must give up the vicarious joy in that others are smart and I will be too as soon as I get time. But now I can get smarter on a just-in-time and as-needed basis because I know where to go when I need to be smarter about a topic in my field.

O brave new world that has such documents in it!


Related posts:
State of the Ark
How Not to Update your Look and Feel

State of the Ark

State of the ark: A phrase I coined (I think) to represent feeling that the technology you are using is so cool when in reality it is like so yesterday.

For example, I got a new phone this weekend that I think is neat because it slides open, and I can display my wife's picture and have a special ring-tone when she calls. Other than that, it just makes and takes calls. Someone wanting to mock my enthusiasm could say "Mike's new phone is state of the ark." It would simultaneously mock my phone and my technology naivete. Sort of like "Bless his heart."

Use and enjoy.

How not to update your look and feel

Mike Hughes, STC 1VP not afraid to embrace new technologies


One of the themes that keeps coming at me as an officer of STC is that STC needs to modernize its image so that it has more appeal to the upcoming generation of technical communicators. Our demographics certainly show that we have to increase our appeal to a younger segment of the industry.

It reminds me of when I was speaking at a CDC conference on healthcare communication and my topic was Web usability. Someone in the audience asked the question, "I'm designing a Website for young African-American males, what advice can you give me?" My reply was "Don't take advice from a fifty year old white guy."

Good advice then, and I'm in a similar dilemma now (only ten years older). I need to recruit people whose skills I really can't judge, and I need to direct work I'm not situated to evaluate. I just have this amusing vision of me and my peers among the board and senior staff (albeit with some exceptions) sitting around saying, "Yeah, this is the stuff that young people want."

The best advice I can come up with is "Use the Force, Luke." Seriously, I need to include younger folks I trust at a gut level who seem to have a good reputation among the demographic I'm trying to reach, and then suspend my own "But that's not how I would do it" reflex.

In fact, it might be a good idea to reject any proposal I like. {sigh}

You're wrong, and I must warn the others

I took a pretty intense course during my doctoral studies that explored different ways we can study our interactions in groups. I learned a lot about myself, and the title of my blog today is the title of the reflective report I wrote. It was the defining characteristic I had discovered about myself that was making the wheels come off in some of my key interactions.

I still have the problem, but I am more aware of it and hopefully self-regulate faster and better when I fall back into it. For example, I corrected my wife last night when she referred to that thing I use to propel my kayak as an "oar." "No, honey, it's called a paddle." I knew what she meant, so why sidetrack a perfectly good conversation? At least it was just the two of us--sometimes I stop the flow of a meeting or presentation to make a similarly useless point. Hopefully not as much as I used to.

Why am I blogging about this?

Technical communicators, as a breed, suffer from a similar hang-up, perhaps more accurately described as "I must copy-edit every document and conversation I touch." Perhaps the worst offenders are The Typo Eradication Advancement League (TEAL), who actually go as far as to deface historical artifacts they feel have been punctuated incorrectly. But there is a little TEAL in all of us.

What's wrong with taking a stand for correct language?

First, by who's definition? I am notorious for getting as much use out of a document as possible, so I get to see myself edited on what is essentially the same article by multiple editors. Trust me, folks, there is not a consensus even among top editors about the best way to turn a phrase. What I change to suit one I must put back to suit another.

Second, it's often idiosyncratic. It's not that what the original person has said is wrong, it's just not how the person correcting it would have said it. Fine, get in on the act when the page is blank and you get to say it exactly as you would like.

Third (and most important) it gets in the way of the conversation and shifts the focus from substance to style. Sure, edit away at a user assistance file that's going out to the public, but we can keep quiet about the typo in the e-mail or worse yet what a person says in conversation.

Here are some questions I am going to try to ask myself more before I say, "Shouldn't that be...?"

• Is it worth the speed bump I am about to insert in the conversation or the process?
• Will it make a real difference in meaning or am I just spraying the bushes to put my scent on them?
• If it's OK with my peers, can it be so bad that I need to intervene?
  

A Day at the Ballpark

The Atlanta STC chapter had a great community-building event: We went to a minor league baseball game as a group. We went to see the Gwinnett Braves (the farm team for the Atlanta Braves). Tickets were $6.00 and parking was $3.00. We tailgated and had a fun time. Great little stadium, cold beer, and a lot of grass I don't have to mow. What more could you ask for? There was one fist-fight over the serial comma rule, but other than that, a good time was had by all. (OK, I'm kidding about the comma rule fist fight, but a good time was had by all.) Thanks, Jen and Rachel for a creative event to bring professionals together in a social context.

Trying not to squander my ignorance

Ah! Convergences.

I am working on writing some high level patterns for what kind of content users need. One of the patterns is "Product Overview" and I was just starting to think about it when...

...all of a sudden I win a copy of Madcap Flare! Now, this is the third time I've won a copy of Madcap Flare, and the first two times I donated them to my alma mater, Southern Polytechnic State University. This one I'm going to keep. For one thing, now that I am sixty, I realize that one day I will retire from IBM and not have access to the Information Developer's Work Bench, so I had better start coming back up to speed on other products if I want to teach/consult/contract.

Also, having a new product to learn will give me first-hand insight into the "new product out of the box" user experience. I have only one shot at using this product for the first time, so I want to notice what's going on in my mind and what information I need.

First, they have a very nice dynamic help pane. Mind you, this is something I usually advise against because the real estate it consumes is very precious, and I argue that UI development will some day take it back or the user will. But there it is on a prestigious product so I'm thinking maybe I'm being a curmudgeon.

I decide to take a 30 minute "tour" (they also have a tutorial, but I traditionally hate those because they make me do a project I don't care about). Tour is working pretty well as they show me what's what, and then very early they do an interesting thing:

They close the dynamic help pane in the tour's example so that they have more room.


Even the Help writers shut down the dynamic Help pane because it takes up too much room! Not only that, but it's one of the first things they teach the user to do.

So it validates my point: Don't put too many eggs in the dynamic help pane basket--it won't be there for long. Have a UA strategy that delivers embedded assistance without the footprint of a dedicated Help pane.

Well, back to noticing what it feels like to learn a new product.

Iron Hoop

I finished posting my novel Iron Hoop to the Internet over the weekend. It's interesting that a blog turned out to be a fairly OK way to post a novel. Not ideal, but free, accessible, and I know how to do it.

I'm not sure what I expect to get from this. If nothing, else, just a chance to tell a story that amused me in the writing of it (ten years ago). Oh sure, an off-the-wall chance that I can bypass the agents who have shown no interest in it in hopes that a publisher or screen writer finds it and likes it. Or maybe I'll win the lottery.

At any rate, I feel like I've got one more thing on my bucket list checked off.

At the heart of every technical writer...

... is someone with dreams of the "Great American Novel" and I am no exception.

I decided to publish my little novella that I have written (Iron Hoop) electronically using the Google blog engine. I will be loading it chapter by chapter over the next several weeks.

It is a coming of age kind of thing about growing up in the Deep South is the early sixties.

Ah the Internet!

Iron Hoop

Why do people listen to me?

And more importantly, why will they listen to you? I find myself mentoring writers who would like to get published or speak at conferences, and I notice that most have the same reticence: "I don't have anything important or new to say."

Yesterday I read my speaker's bio for the upcoming UA Europe 2009 conference and felt quite abashed. (The one in my preconference workshop description was even more 'abashing.') My initial reaction was "I've got to meet this guy." Like those who seek my advice on speaking and writing with authority and influence, my reaction was "I don't deserve those words." It reminded me of the first time I spoke at a WritersUA conference where I had one of the big rooms. I saw my title slide on a screen that was bigger than the flag backdrop in the movie Patton, and I wanted to tell the audience that what I had to say did not deserve a screen that big.

So I pondered all this on my drive to work this morning and asked myself how I had become a pundit. Actually, it's an important question because all technical communicators are in the business of speaking with authority and influence, and often we feel inadequate in the role. Like who am I to be writing about firewall rules in a help file meant for network security professionals?

The following curve came to me on I285 (it was rush hour and traffic was slow). The best part is that I got to see my love of bell curves and Sufism converge.

Click graph to enlarge

Pundits are not the leaders of the pack. In the adoption curve, I've always come into the party pretty late in the game [sound of mixed metaphors colliding], but that is where the pundit adds value. Up to that point, the innovators and early adopters have been tightly focused on details. In a way they are like the blind men in the Sufi tale, each feeling only a part of the elephant. Only someone joining in late can see the elephant as a whole. It is the role of the pundit to say "It's an elephant."

How do the innovators and early adopters react to this? "Duh, no lie, Einstein."

How do those coming behind the pundit react? "Wow, that is so cool, I get it."

The secret is to not compare yourself to the really smart people who have gone before you--that is way depressing, trust me. Instead, look at what you can offer to those coming behind. And incidentally, look at the area of that curve! What? 100 million people who can benefit from technology such and such, and a third are already doing it? That's 33 million folks in line ahead of you. Oh wait, that's 67 million behind you.

So recognize that as a technical communication professional, you're getting involved with products and technologies often at the sweet spot: Early enough to have a sizable audience that's not there yet, and late enough to have the vantage point to be able to see the elephant in the details.

Write about it, speak about it, let yourself get a little recognition for it. Just never quit blushing at the sales hype about you and wanting to "meet THAT guy."

How to improve the UI--really!

A colleague has made me realize that user assistance writers are codependents of bad UI design. Because we explain how the UI really works, we somehow leave our developers and companies feeling like they're "covered" when the users have a bad experience.

We're not covered; the users still had the bad experience. It's just that we can apply the "nanny nanny boo boo, you should have read the manual" defense.

A simple example is the Delete button. Because of bad design practices, it has two meanings in many software applications: "Hasta la vista, baby" as in gone, gone, gone, and "Removed from here and put somewhere else in case you change your mind" as in the Recycle Bin. Because of that ambiguity, we had a discussion at work about the need to explain in the context sensitive help exactly which Delete we meant on a particular dialog box.

But why is the UI using the same word for two very different actions in the first place?

So here is my new challenge. What if Help quit explaining how to interact with the UI and quit telling the users how the system would respond? What if that became the burden of the UI itself to make interactions clear and outcomes predictable? Better labeling, embedded text, useful tool tips, etc.

What would technical communicators do? What would Help do?

For starters, technical communicators could help write UI text. Then we could reserve Help for scenario type of topics, ala how to achieve some business outcome using the product or encourage users to attempt complex tasks by demonstrating their value.

But we have to break out of our codependency first. Part of me likes to document the obvious because it's easy; part of me likes to compensate for bad design because it gives me instant "I add value" gratification.

Sometimes being part of the solution just makes us part of the problem.

New column and lessons from the Dobro

I have a new column out in UXmatters: Architecting UA for Reuse: Case Examples in DITA.

Although I have owned a Dobro-like guitar for some years now, I just now got around to actually "studying" the correct techniques. Man! I had it all wrong. But the experience reminds me of a point my usability mentor, Loren Burke, used to make all the time. He observed that a common learning pattern was:

1. This is easy.
2. This is hard.
3. This is easy.

I see/hear a new song on Youtube or on one of the instructional links and think, "Oh I can play that." I then start to learn it and find that the picking patterns are awkward and the guitar sounds like a pig being tortured. I was three days into a half-minute rendition of "Will the Circle Be Unbroken" and sounding like someone putting thumbscrews to Porky. Then I woke up Sunday morning, picked up the Dobro, and voila! I could play it.

So it looked and sounded easy as a naive novice; it became hard as a struggling novice; then suddenly expertise emerged and it was easy!

So how does user assistance help move a user from the naive "this is easy" to the expert "this is easy"?

I don't have a good answer to that one yet, but I know this: The secret to learning to play the guitar well is to enjoy playing it badly. This seems counter-intuitive, but the point is that you can only achieve the second level of "this is easy" through practice, practice, practice. So you have to somehow enjoy that "this is hard" period enough to keep coming back and eventually work through it.

So how do we convert this principle into a working model for product skills where users do not want to invest time and energy in the "this is hard" phase?

My hope is to figure that out and get rich. In the meantime, I'll enjoy that slide up on the B string to G and the following back roll drone for a while before tackling some new way to make Porky screech.