Ready, Fire, Aim

It's not what you think, I'm actually in favor of that sequence as a development strategy.

At its core, it's the heart of Agile development, rapid prototyping, and all kinds of good things that get people engaged.

There's an old technical writer joke (i.e., a joke told by an old technical writer).

Instructions for getting unlost in the woods:

1. Pack a user guide with a typo in it.
2. Pack two loaves of bread and some cold cuts.
3. Sit and wait for the dozens of people who will find you to tell you about the typo. (The bread and cold cuts are so you can have sandwiches for them when they come calling.)

The point is that people don't get very engaged over abstract ideas or plans, but put some kind of a design stake in the ground and man do they come alive! In short, give them something to criticize or disagree with as early as possible, then make the sandwiches and wait for the crowd.

A problem we have as traditional technical communicators (designers all around probably) is that we are reluctant to show early designs that we know aren't very good. We all want to clean the house before the housekeeper shows up.

I was at the UA Europe conference in Cardiff earlier this month, and one of the presenters, Leisa Reichelt, talked about her experience getting the Drupal.org community actively involved in redesigning their web site. One challenge she had to overcome was her own discomfort at posting "the worst wire frames I had ever done," as early design concepts. But she did it to get early feedback and involvement--and it worked.

Some pointers:

• Don't be afraid to show preliminary work early
• Don't over design--early documents, for example, can have just bullet points capturing the key talking points the topic will address
• Use low-fidelity prototyping tools. If it looks like it was drawn on a napkin, people are less inclined to criticize its lack of polish and more inclined to comment on the essense of the design's objective (check out Balsamiq Mockup).
  
• Use collaboration tools like Wikis. Then if someone points out a typo, quickly answer, "Oh, it's a Wiki, you can correct that any time you like."
• Respond quickly and incorporate suggestions.

These pointers work for all aspects of design: UI, user assistance, and even project plans.

Note: You can substitute pizza for the bread and cold cuts.

Exciting New Assignment

Work is actually fun these days! Of course, when the bar is set by floods and STC meltdowns, "fun" is a relatively easy state to achieve.

I'm lead on a multifunctional team that is tasked with reshaping the user experience for the deployment phase of a SaaS-type application. We have the following types of folks on the team:

• Information developers
• UI developers
• User researcher
• Visual communicator
• UX specialist

Wow! That's some collective horsepower.

I'm also experimenting with some new collaboration tools. This will be my second time using Lotus Connections to manage a project team. It's a nifty piece of collaboration software, combining blog, forum, and wiki technology. I'll also be using some other tools, such as Balsamiq Mockup (wireframing), The Brain (mindmapping), along with a proprietary tool for doing affinity wall type of analysis, and of course, my old standby Visio.

And even though I am no longer officially on the Information Development team, it gives me an opportunity to bring that group into the upstream design process in which I have long argued they belong. See my column Use Cases for User Assistance Writers.

I see a case study if this works; I see some self-pitying blogs down the line if it doesn't. Meanwhile, I'll use this blog to maintain a loose journal as I share what seems to work and what doesn't as I go along.

How High's the Water, Mama?

Any time your life can be described by lyrics in a country-western song, things aren't going so well. As I write this, I'm pretty well landlocked from any place useful, like work or grocery stores, by the Yellow River overrunning its bridges. Oh yeah, I live on the Yellow River, or what used to be the Yellow River; it's now the rapidly moving Yellow Lake. My woods are under water and the river has stabilized a few yards short of my house. I could fish from my deck (if I chose to ignore that I am downstream from a water treatment facility).

I think I'll write a country-western song. I've got the opening down:

I got two cigars and half a bottle of bourbon
How 'm I ever gonna make 'em last all day?

Think I'll start a group-write on Twitter. Join me at @michaelhughesua and contribute.

STC: Quo Vadis?

As long as I'm laying on the gravitas, I'll continue with O tempora, o mores, ubinam gentium sumus?

The times, the manners, where among associations stand we?

I need to figure out where I am with all the STC stuff going on, and blogging will help my introspection. Also, it will let me share with you some of the background and complexity that surround the current state of affairs with STC. My e-mail tag line reads "Anyone who is sure of the answer doesn't understand the question," and this blog is an invitation to join me in understanding how we got here, where we are, and where I think we need to go. And this is social media, so feel free to comment in and share your perspectives back with me.

How we got here

Cindy Currie, our STC President, has already provided the answer in her article in News and Notes:

As I have previously mentioned, the shortfall is primarily due to the negative impact the recession has had on our two main sources of revenue—membership dues and the annual conference. But going forward, we have to solve a problem bigger than the recession. For years STC has been adding and expanding services and activities to benefit members and the profession without taking a hard look at how to sustain those activities. And with only periodic, modest increases in fees, the costs to sustain those services and activities have outpaced our dues and total revenue such that the Society has actually been subsidizing these activities.

A little more backstory.
We have been seeing a decline in membership going back roughly to the technology meltdown of the dot.bomb. Many costs to service members are relatively fixed, that is, rent doesn't go down, we don't pay less for legal services, it costs the same to design and edit a magazine issue for 10,000 as it does for 20,000, etc. So what happens is that as membership declines, the costs to serve individual members go up. But the board has historically been reluctant to raise dues. Part of the reason is that members complain when dues go up-duh!

But part of the problem on our part was that dues and budget discussions were not as tightly linked as they should have been. We were not asking the appropriate question when we discussed dues, namely, "How much money do we need in order to do what we want to do?" We focused too heavily on member reaction.

Another problem is that we often debated programs at the line item level based on their merits. Questions like "Should we get rid of this?" were answered with "No, it's a good thing to do." We missed the "But we can't afford to do them all; something good has to go."

In short, we weren't putting all the pieces on the table at the same time.

Another interesting thing about membership is that even though we get a healthy number of new members every year, we lose more than we gain. Hmmmmmm. Is that saying something about perceived value? Of course it is, and that has not been lost on the leadership team. We tend to keep a core of loyal members (I love all of you), but that has created a demographic problem: A lot of us are older and will be retiring in the coming decade. We are losing our "next generation" of STC members. The upshot is that decisions about how to grow the society are being made by those who often lack the perspective of what the target population wants. Ouch!! OK, that one hits this sixty-year old boy too, so hold off on the flames. (See How Not to Update Your Look and Feel)

Where we are today

OK, so we are in some interesting times:

• We have a significant shortfall in income caused by the same economic crisis that deflated our reserves that were supposed to get us through just such a predicament.
• We have a dues structure that can't cover costs of basic membership.
• Our alternative revenue engine (the conference) has become a big question mark as we try to guess how well it can perform in this economic climate.
• We're out of step as a society with where the profession is going and who the emerging professionals are.
  

So if you're wondering what we chowder-heads on the board are doing, welcome to our world :-) No excuses, but we didn't make this world. It is what it is; we're just the ones who must lead during these critical times.

Three things have to happen in the following order:

1. We must deal with the shortfall.
2. We must restructure how we manage the finances so our model is based on sustainability.
3. We must reinvent STC so that it is not only relevant to where we are going as a profession, we must be THE place where the voices who are shaping that direction are heard.

My ship analogy is that the storm has blown us on the reef; here's the drill:

1. Bail so we don't sink.
2. Fix the damage and restore physical integrity to the ship's structure.
3. Set a new course.

As everyone knows, part of the current solution to "we're sinking" is to transfer surplus reserves from the chapters. Wow, that has a lot of problems associated with it, so why are we taking such a controversial and difficult route?

Because those are the only pockets deep enough and liquid enough to solve the problem in time.

By the way, the shortfall is $1.2M, and we are handling all but $470K through cost reductions, debt rescheduling, and negotiations. What we need from the chapters is the $470K we won't be able to cover without their help.

We can do quick things that kind of translate into "Let's have a cake sale." Great, but we need $470K. That's a lot of cakes.

We can offer big programs; our certification task force thinks the potential revenue there could get into millions. Great, great, great, but it will take longer than we have.

So we've gone to the chapters. Not fair, some of that money has come from their own independent efforts (Atlanta still has some great cookbooks, by the way). Not fair! But a necessary sacrifice if we are to survive. I just don't have anything else I can say on that.

Point two, we have created a zero-based budget that looks at the whole picture: revenue, dues, and expenses as an integrated whole. We have a model that will be sound and sustainable. It is built on the principle that members should pay based on the level of services they receive. I can't get into the details, but if you watch those great Progressive Insurance ads (with Flo) and pay attention to the "Build the policy you can afford" one, then you'll get an idea of where we're going.

But dues will go up! The reaction we've already gotten is "How can you raise dues when part of your problem is you don't have enough members? Lower dues and get more members!"

The truth is that we could make it up in volume, but we cannot get to the volume it would take. Not in this economy, not with our current "curb appeal." Step two, then, is get a revenue/expense model that makes financial sense.

Politically, this is a hard sell. We want our national politicians to get rid of our deficit-bound economy, "Balance the budget, you idiots!" Then if one runs for office saying "I'll raise taxes and reduce services," we run him out of town on a rail. You see, he didn't understand that we wanted him to balance the budget by lowering taxes and increasing services.

Where are we going?

Phase 3: We must reinvent STC so that it is not only relevant to where we are going as a profession, we must be THE place where the voices who are shaping that direction are heard.

We need to be about content that helps professionals keep pace in a profession that measures how current you are in the dot releases of the tools you use.

• We are on the verge of releasing the Body of Knowledge Portal--a critical step in being THE resource to start with with any question related to technical communication
• We are moving into social media to help connect professionals into communities and resources.
• We are defining how a certification program will make us the defining group in our profession and draw new members and employers to us.

There are still some glaring shortcomings, not the least is we still do not have a good strategic marketing strategy for moving forward. That WILL come, but we must first solidify a modern value proposition that gives us a compelling message to market.

Conclusion

I hope this didn't come across as whiney--but I want folks to understand the true complexity of the problem space. I'm not standing here saying "Trust us," I'm saying "Help us." But for you to be helpful, you need to understand the full backstory and complications we are dealing with.

Finally, many heartfelt thanks to all who have Ninged and Tweeted with your support and with your criticisms. Stay with STC, be part of the exciting future we are building together, and support our programs as they roll out. Think Dallas 2010 and tell your bosses NOW to budget for it. Hint: Lloyd is working up some sweet early bird deals.

Bad Help

I just encountered the worst Help file I've ever seen, and that includes student projects from my days teaching Online Documentation at Southern Poly.

The content pane and the pane for displaying the TOC, Index, and Find (Find? as in can you say WinHelp.exe?) are two separate panes, and the TOC pane is modal!

Click to see enlarged version.

Not only that, but the Help is written at the microtask level--no insight as to how do I use this product to do something useful.

OK, so maybe this is some restaurant management software or some other application written by someone with no concept of user experience.

NO! This is a product designed and distributed by a company in the usability business--one whose product is meant to help you design usable software.

In all fairness, the product is way cool and works pretty well, but why do usability companies get all the way down to the user assistance level and then suddenly get usability stupid?

Dots is important

So I get an email from my IT guy saying that if we haven't already upgraded to WhatEver ver 8.02 we would be vaporized or something. Not being particularly anxious to get vaporized or something, I start to feel a little angst. I click About WhatEver and I see that I am at ver 8.0.2.

Hmmm, 8.0.x would be older than 8.02, but I've never seen a version number incremented with a leading zero after the point.

Am I OK because IT guy is sloppy about version numbers, or am I a candidate for the poof-mobile? Or am I just an anal-retentive technical writer?

I made a screen shot of my version splash screen and sent it to IT guy and asked if he really meant 8.0.2.

A DECENT human being would have responded, "Oh, my bad, I got sloppy and caused you unnecessary angst," and then he would have sent out a new e-mail clarifying his error to the rest of the company, but NOOOOOOOOOOOO. I got "You can ignore the notice."

You'd think folks who work with software day in and day out for a company that develops software would get version numbers better than IT guy.

So what did I learn today?

I'm an anal-retentive technical writer.

Myyyy Eyeeeeees!!!!

OK, I'm tired of being thrown into epileptic-like seizures as I sit through demos and walk-throughs of user interfaces.

I'm referring to speakers who twitch and jiggle the mouse, or who do a mad paint of the screen with the pointer as they search for the target they want to click.

Tip for anyone doing software training or demos:

Don't touch the mouse until you have made eye contact with the target. Then tell the user what you are going to click, and then go there smoothly (and directly) and click.

Thank you in advance.

Change is good

Well, not always. I'm tempted to rant about a recent experience at a bagel joint where I got short changed three times in the same transaction!

But other kinds of change are good. My role at work is changing, for example. Instead of being a User Assistance Architect in the Information Development group, I will be an Information Architect in the Usability group. Same boss's boss, but different boss and peer group.

Sad to be leaving old boss and old peers, but excited about the new boss and new team. Real excited about doing UX design again. It's one thing to look at a UI and noodle how to explain it; it's pretty scary when the page is blank and you have to lead the design.

I intend to continue this blog and its theme of user assistance. My focus will shift to embedded assistance and contextual assistance, that is, I will focus on user assistance that is delivered directly through the application UI. It will be interesting to see how my new found interest in Social Media plays out in my new role. I can already envision links that would have said "Tell me more about this option" now saying "Let me chat with others who have used this option."

How to make me stupid

Technical communication is essentially story telling on one hand and sense making on the other. I've noticed (suffered at the hands of) several patterns involving numbers that obscure both.

Consider the following question, "How much does widget A weigh?"

Bad answer: "You have to understand that it will be different in different situations. If it is the blue techno-widget, it will be 30 pounds, but if it is the red techno-widget, it can be as low as 20 pounds depending on if it is a model D, which is 20 pounds or a model C which weighs 25 pounds because it has the heavy duty battery."

Huh?

Better answer: "Twenty to thirty pounds depending on the model and battery type."

Common mistakes when talking about numbers

Here are common mistakes I see when people talk technical with numbers:

• Combining numbers with conditional statements. That's the mistake in the previous example. I'm having to hold too many variables in my head before I can get closure on a declarative sentence. Lead off with a simple declaration followed by exceptions. Another acceptable answer would be "About 25 pounds." That relates a bit to the next common mistake.
• Not rounding to a reasonable level. I sit in a lot of budget discussions where we are essentially discussing estimates and guesses and I am forced to comprehend and store numbers like 23,462 when 23,000 or even 20,000 is sufficient. Many people do not understand the rule of significant figures, that is, an answer cannot have more significant figures than are warranted by the input accuracy. For example, 10 volts divided by 30 ohms does not result in a current of .333333333333 amps. It results in .3 amps.
• Giving algebra problems instead of answers. "Q: How much does widget A weigh? A: Ten pounds more than widget B." Great, widget A weighs x + 10, solve for x.
  

There is a scene in Othello where the generals argue about how many ships are in the approaching armada. The bottom line, stated more eloquently by Shakespeare is "It's a shit-load of ships." In other words, providing the exact number is less important than contextualizing the impact.

I qualify as an offshore resource

Gasp! I can't live with the scandal anymore. I WAS BORN IN KENYA! I'm not a native US citizen.

Social Web: This old dog finally gets it

I think there should be a "Get Out of Purgatory Early" card for folks my age who try to keep up with Social Media. I signed up for Twitter and Facebook a while back to see if I was missing anything. I must admit I was pretty baffled by it all for a bit.

Tweets like "Just turned the computer on, man am I tired," left me wondering why the tweeter felt that the world was waiting for that update. Facebook people were poking me and taking quizzes that told everyone what kind of Simpson character they would be.

Huh?

A sliver of light

My first inkling that there could be something useful lurking here happened at the Atlanta STC Summit. As the host chapter, we arranged for the Atlanta Braves to have someone at our hospitality booth one morning to sell block tickets for a Braves game that night. The day he was to arrive, it occurred to me that we had not publicized this in any way. I asked Lisa Pappas, who is way cooler than I am when it comes to social networking, if she could tweet that the rep was coming on the #tag we were using for the Summit (I barely knew what a #tag was). She did. At one point I took a break from the board meeting to step out and apologize to the rep for the lack of advance publicity and found him packing up early. He had sold the allocated block!

Hmmm. That was useful.

More illumination

I then started to notice that I was using Twitter like a news aggregator because people I was following would recommend interesting Web articles they had just read. I recently noted the following pattern of tweets, going from great to lame:

• Great: There an interesting article on such and such at http:...
• Good: There comes a time in the lifecycle of a document you have to shoot the writer and publish the damn thing.
• Lame: I had oatmeal for breakfast.

I had been judging the social Web based on the abundance of "oatmeal for breakfast" tweets and posts I had been seeing.

Let there be full light

Recently, however, the major light bulb went on for me. I was starting to feel a lot more connected with contacts I usually saw once a year at a conference. The odds that I would pick up a phone or shoot an email to someone like Phylise Banner or Brenda Huettner if I needed help on something was now an order of magnitude higher than if I were not following them on Twitter or friends on Facebook.

It's as if I were linked into a social network! [a Mikey major Duh! moment]

I also found that I could link with folks I was having somewhat adversarial relationships with in STC. As an officer, I've taken quite a bit of heat over some unpopular decisions and problems lately from well-meaning and articulate critics. Twitter and Facebook have given me the opportunity to interface with some of these critics at the level of home-brewed beer and love of musical instruments. Their confrontations have been reduced from my total perception of them to being just part of a broader understanding of who they are. Hopefully that has gone the other way as well.

Suddenly the faceless and voiceless critics have become people who brew beer and play music. Does that make me now more willing to listen to them? You know, I think it does! At least it makes it easier.

I've said it before, "Oh brave new world..."

You Can't Handle the Truth

I was in a staff meeting recently where the topic was "What do you need to know in order to do your job better?" I can summarize the general theme in one word, "Truth." What is the real schedule, what are the real priorities, how is the project really going?

It seems truth is a rare commodity going both ways on the communication chain. People were equally concerned that they weren't getting the truth from management and that management wasn't being told the truth.

I'm not telling stories out of school; namely, because this is the same discussion I have heard at every software company I have ever worked at. I suspect it transcends industries as well.

• I was at an international conference in Leeds, England, on Learning in the Workplace where the keynote speaker asked "Have you noticed that the purpose of a project status meeting is to hide the status of the project?" He got a standing ovation.
• I used to teach project management at Southern Polytechnic State University and I would tell my students, "If you say the project will be six months late, you will be fired, but you can be one month late six months in a row and nobody bats an eyelash."
• Projects stay in green status until a few weeks before release and then go into red--all of a sudden the code doesn't work.
• Projects change status or iterations end not because criteria have been met, rather, because their due dates have arrived.

Part of the problem is an inherent dislike for delivering bad news. Partly as CYA and partly because genuinely we want to please others. We accept the pleasant fiction for the very reason that it is pleasant.

Part of it is that we treat mistakes like crimes and punish those who make them. Therefore, mistakes become things we must cover up.

But I think a major contributor is the whole myth of project management. We estimate dates and resources when we know very little about the problem space, let alone the solution, and then those dates become holy unto themselves. We beg others to lie to us (sometimes even insist on it). "How long will this take?" "Three months." "Not good enough, give me a better estimate!"

Let me offer a radical proposal: What if projects were open ended? What if a product didn't ship until it was ready? Instead of dates, we had feature and performance specifications, resource allocations, and release criteria. "Nothing would ever ship," might be a reasonable rebuttal. That is pretty telling in and of itself.

I know the devil is in the details, but it might be time to rethink our current model of design and development.

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.