Energy in; energy out

OK, be prepared for Dante's 6th inner ring of metaphor Hell.

I broke down and took a by-gawd Dobro lesson this week. I figure it's time to get serious about my music so I paid this guy $100 for a three-hour Vulcan mind-meld of Musical Theory 101. Never touched my guitar. (He got interrupted, though, so I did get to play his $5000 Dobro for about 20 minutes while he handled a domestic emergency.)

So I go home with his two-sided yellow legal page on which he had scribbled the sacred code that explained the chromatic scale, all of the keys, and the how to construct every major, minor, and dominant chord. I was overwhelmed and stunned. Had I just gotten the deal of a lifetime or did I just flush five Andrew Jacksons down the toilet?

The next day I pick up my Dobro and start experimenting with the different patterns of the chromatic scale notes on the fretboard and playing around with the chord construction schemes he had taught me. It got interesting when I started playing around with a G9, one of the dominants. It was a different sound and I started putting a bit of a riff around it and pretty soon was playing a jaunty little latin-sounding thing I ended up calling "Tijuana Roller Coaster" because it had an unbalanced feel caused by the G9 and then resolved nicely to a slide up into the 1st inversion of the root chord (C) with a pause and then a final C note on the bass-most string.

OK, a little of that intro is just me showing off the new stuff I learned--but heck, I paid a hundred bucks to be able to write that paragraph, and it's my blog so humor me.

But it reminded me of the importance of grounding the energy out of a system. I used to be an electronics technician, and one of the electrical components we dealt with was the capacitor. A capacitor stores energy, and after you take one out of a circuit it can still give you a bit of a shock if you don't short the two terminals and get rid of the charge. If it has a big charge stored, you might have to do that a couple of times.

I've noticed that a lot of music does a similar thing. Notice how many symphonies end with a big chord that the orchestra repeats a couple of times? Ta Dah!.. dah...dah. Well, it's like the symphony has the musicians and the audience all worked up and the composer is trying to ground them at the end. Leave them someplace comfortable. And as much as I hate the practice of rock musicians trashing their instruments and amps at the end of a performance, I understand that they are trying to ground all of that energy so the performance leaves them and the audience back at sea level and not soaring up in the clouds.

So my slide to the root chord was to ground the listener, get him or her back to a safe place. But a 1st inversion chord is still a tad unsettling. A root chord is like having three singers harmonizing with the notes do, mi, sol, respectively. The first inversion would have them sing mi, sol, do with do being sung as the highest note. Still safe and stable, just a wee bit top heavy because the root note is on top instead of at the bottom. So that's why I throw in the root C on the bass-most string at the end, sort of like the second touching of the capacitor to fully discharge the energy. It kind of simulates what happens when a roller coaster stops; it leaves you leaning slightly forward in your seat from your forward momentum for a second, and then you settle back comfortably into the seat. Ta dah! ...dah.

Working with teams has a similar requirement, every now and then you have to ground the energy and bring everybody back into a safe comfort zone. Steven Wright has the line, "You know how you feel when you're leaning back in a chair and then you start to tip backwards? I feel that way all the time." Team work involves a lot of energy as new questions disrupt old, comfortable theories, agendas collide, etc. Periodically you need to ground the team--nobody wants to feel like they're tipping backwards in the chair all the time.

So how do you ground team energy?

In music we emphasize root chords and root notes. Playing in the key of C? End on C, E, G. Safe, predictable, comfortable. Working on a team? Get back to basic assumptions around which the team members can feel safe and comfortable. Weekly summaries are great grounders. Here's what we did this week and what we learned. Chronological descriptions of what happened or what happens are great grounders. Can we all agree that we saw A happen and then B? This is one of the reasons usability tests are great team builders, the team has equal access to the same data: what they saw the users do. As a test facilitator, when teams would start getting edgy over a point and I wanted to ground them, I would get consensus on the sequence of events. "Did the user click Add first or did he type the variable name first?" Direct observations are a safe common ground around which a team can safely discuss and agree on basics.

Other grounders are getting team members to agree again on the high level goals of the project or restating the criteria by which we accept or reject design decisions. C, E, G.

But... There is always a big but...sometimes you need to put energy into the team. The whole reason I like Tijuana Roller Coaster is that it starts on a G9, the musical equivalent to leaning back in your chair right at the tipping point. You energize a team by pulling them out of their safe, comfortable places. As you could well imagine, there are good ways to do this and bad.

When dealing with conflicts (the ultimate energizers), avoid dis-chord, i.e., out and out wrong notes being put together. Emphasize constructive tension. (A G9 introduces constructive tension into a song in the key of C.) Look at the differences in these statements in terms of dis-chord vs constructive tension:

• You're wrong.
• I disagree with you.
• I have a different perspective.

The last one is the rhetorical equivalent to a G9. It gets the tune going and you sure can't leave it there, but it's a pleasant enough tension. The first statement is fingernails on a chalk board.

Enough. The point I wanted to explore is the creative management of energy, when to infuse it and when to dissipate it. I can't wait to see what my next Dobro lesson brings.

Talk Your Walk

I know the title of today's blog seems backwards, but that's the point I want to make. It is not at all unusual to find situations where a person says one thing and does another. In Action Science, that is called a gap between a person's stated beliefs and their theories in use. In common practice we say that someone isn't "walking the talk" with the implication that the problem is in the walk.

Sometimes that's true, but often the reverse could be true, we're walking a particular walk because it works for us and it is the talk that is out of place. Action Science recognizes that and spends as much energy trying to align the message with the reality as it does on adjusting the practice to the preaching.

For example, if you ask writers how to write, they often say, "I start by making an outline." I taught technical writing and I often said "I start by making an outline." Most writers don't actually do that and if you corner them they will say things like, "I really should but..." Maybe, but the alternative is to just quit saying "I start by making an outline." In my case, for instance, I often just start writing. That's my way of exploring the content space. My friend and mentor, Carol Barnum, often says "Writing is thinking." So I start by writing, which gets me thinking about content, theme, and sequence. Interestingly, when I'm about a third of the way into an article, I turn on Outline view in Word and view only headings 1, 2, and 3. It lets me see where the flow is wrong or the appropriate ideas are not getting grouped.

I'm not saying that's the right way to write, but I have been successful with it so I need to quit telling people "I start by making an outline." I need to say, "I just dive in initially as a way of dumping what I already know and getting a feel for the content."

We confuse people when there is a disconnect between our stated beliefs and our theories in use. When managers say they demand teamwork but evaluate employees based on individual accomplishments, they do a disservice to the person who puts the team's overall needs ahead of his or her specific goals. That person gets punished for believing what the boss said and acting on it. The same applies to spouses, kids, friends, and all.

But don't be so quick to blame the disconnect on your behavior--It could be you are reciting scripts that describe what you think you should do. Actions speak loudly, and we are getting something that works for us from our behaviors or else we would have abandoned them (compulsive behavior aside).

So there is absolutely nothing wrong with the following talk:

• I start writing by just letting the firing of every synapse go to my fingers and then I organize and clean it up later.
• Although I value teamwork, I will evaluate each employee on his or her individual achievements first. It's my job as manager to make sure that your individual goals add up to a team achievement.
• We are not all equal here, I am more mindful of engineers' time than writers' time. That's just the reality of it.
• I'm going to ask if these jeans look good on me because I'm feeling fat, but I'm just fishing for some positive stroking.

It's kind of like using turn signals when you drive. It's easier for others to avoid hitting you if you share where you're going.

Moron Holes

My buddy, Miranda, is a gamer, and she showed me a new one that allows the participant to shoot a hole into a wall that sort of bypasses normal space and time limits and lets the player emerge, for example, on the the other side of an otherwise uncrossable chasm. Cool.

I think a similar device explains how some people can jump from assumption A to a logically inaccessible conclusion B--they're traveling through moron holes.

Classical logicians were unfamiliar with quantum concepts such as wormholes, so they had to explain such leaps from A to B with phrases such as non-sequitor or post hoc ergo propter hoc, without any explanation about how the speaker had accomplished such a feat.

No longer. We now have a scientific explanation: The speaker fell through a moron hole.

So at your next meeting when the project manager suggests that the doc can be ready on the same day coding the UI is done, you can glibly reply, "What moron hole did you fall through?"

Uh, bring cookies to the status meeting.

Screen Shots in Documentation

Sometimes someone gives me documentation that "so and so" put together for his IT group that tells them how to install our product. Generally, the purpose is to show me how "real users" want to see documentation. Invariably it is a 32-step procedure with a screen shot in every step.

Well, obviously, the writer in not familiar with Robert Horn or the demands for accessibility and globalization that I must deal with, so I have dismissed it.

But it just keeps coming back, so I'm going to ask myself, "What if they're right?"

First, so I can be more open to new thinking, let me purge myself of all the reasons I have traditionally rejected screen shots in documentation:

1. Every time the UI gets modified, screen shots must get updated.
2. Every time the UI gets translated, new screen shots must be generated in the new language and coordinated into the translated text.
3. Information in the screen shot (like button selection or entries) must be documented in the steps anyway so the information can be rendered by adaptive technologies like screen readers.
4. Many screen shots just show the reader what the user is already seeing.
5. Users may be overly attracted to the visual and miss important points in the explanatory text.
6. It makes the document bigger.

Now let me changes hats a bit a take a critical look at my traditional positions.

Objection 1 (updating screen shots) seems writer-centric. Essentially it is saying "It makes my job harder." Well if it does make the user's job easier, it would make sense that it makes my job harder--nothing's free. OK, Objection 1 is bad.

Objection 2 (translation) is just an instantiation of Objection 1. Therefore, Objection 2 is bad.

Hmmmm, I don't like how this is going so far :-(

Objection 3 (information still has to exist in words) has some substance. Information in a screen shot cannot be used to substitute for information in the steps. Unless of course, you're not worried about accessibility. Now that's an entirely different blog!

Objection 4 (what good is a picture of what the user can clearly see) has always resonated with me. Here is an example:

This example is particularly problematic for me since the UI text is actually pretty explanatory.

It also can get fairly tedious. consider the next steps that follow the example above:


But it seems that this by-the-numbers, picture-by-picture aspect is the attraction for this type of documentation. As in "So easy a..." well you get the picture.


So am I hearing from users who want this type of documentation, or am I hearing from technicians who think users need this level of hand-holding?


Objection 5 (visually distracts from useful text) has merit. Although it's true that a picture is worth a thousand words, it did take seven words to express that concept, and I'm not sure how you would get that across as well in a picture. Also, I think it is easier to wrap context around an example if the example is in words. For example, in the following shot, is the value 10240 an example or is it the value the user should enter?


And in the next example, the screen shot visually contradicts the step.


Objection 6 (document size) should be evaluated based on the merit of the document. If the screen shots make the document better, no one will care about bigger.

So where does this leave me?

I am going to be more open to including screen shots where they do the following:

• Help reassure the user that where they are in the UI is the right place to be
• Help call attention to a specific area of a complex UI
• Support an example that is hard to visualize otherwise, e.g., setting up a desktop configuration
  

So where they add value, I'll be more willing to tackle those aspects that make my job harder (e.g., documentation maintenance). But just as I would with words, I'll cut out the obvious and whatever does not add value. I prefer an additive approach (put it in only when the words seem inadequate) over a subtractive approach (take it out if it seems superfluous). In other words, I'll be more open to screen shots in the future, but they have to work themselves into the document, not just be their by entitlement until expelled.

State of the Ark (part 2)

As I said in an earlier blog, "state of the ark" is my phrase for when I think I am on the leading edge of technology when in fact I'm back among the late majority or laggards.

One of the problems with playing a Dobro all by yourself is that the instrument is really suited to provide accents and solo snippets. But I'd look a bit stupid standing in my den tapping my foot doing nothing then occasionally playing a "twinky twang."

So I thought I should get some bluegrass CDs so I could get used to playing in the context of a band. If you need a visualization, see this classic Andy Kaufmann bit from SNL.

I decided to go to Amazon.com to look at what was available. I thought to myself, "Wouldn't it be cool if when you bought albums online, you could actually hear bits of each track?" What a great, innovative idea. I could get RICH!!!!!


So, how long has Amazon been doing that, and why haven't I taken advantage of it before?

We probably don't think of music clips as user assistance, but this feature helped me make an informed choice (Patty Loveless, Mountain Soul II), and that's the ultimate goal of UA.

Job well done, Amazon.

New Media: Transparency vs TMI

A couple of interesting web sites hit my radar today:

This one is an article about some thrashing at the New York Times and the Washington Post about what staffers can appropriately blog and tweet about:
http://www.niemanlab.org/2009/09/is-transparency-the-new-objectivity-2-visions-of-journos-on-social-media/

This site links to 100 organizational policies on social media:
http://socialmediagovernance.com/policies.php

As a blogger and tweeter, I worry a bit about if I ever cross the line of "what happens at work stays at work" (or my other life--STC--where we have a strong code of "the board speaks with one voice").

I often blog about projects at work or insights I have gained from my interactions with fellow workers. And recently, I blogged about the internal debate I have had with myself over some STC issues.

The issue is when does transparency become TMI (too much information)?

On one side, I am a trained and committed Action Scientist who holds that ideas and assertions get better and more accurate when subjected to public scrutiny. In short, thinking stupid thoughts in private won't make you any smarter, but sharing those stupid thoughts lets you benefit from feedback--and you thereby get smarter. (Apologies to Chris Argyris for that over-simplification)

On the other side, companies need to keep proprietary discussions private, and colleagues need to be able to express themselves frankly without fear of having their personal positions show up in someone's blog.

Lacking a well thought out philosophy, I have jotted down the following principles for myself.

• Never put anything in a tweet/blog that could strengthen your company's competitors.
• Never put anything in a tweet/blog that would embarrass a colleague.

I also stay mindful of the following hierarchy of risk (from lowest to highest):

1. Reporting facts--The main risk in reporting facts is that you must make sure the facts have been released for public consumption. For example, it is low risk for me to say in a blog that STC has a task force looking at certification. However, it would be risky to talk about a decision we have made but have not communicated.
   
2. Illuminating the issues (identifying pros and cons)--I think this is the safest and most responsible space for thought leaders. Using the certification example again, it would be useful to articulate what are the issues around certification, helping readers make more informed decisions on their own.
   
3. Advocating a position--Advocating a position has higher risks in so far as you might be in public disagreement with a standing policy or with another colleague. That's not necessarily bad. Action Science holds that we worry too much about avoiding conflict rather that opening up the deliberation for public scrutiny and feedback. Still, it needs to be handled with tact and respect for others' positions.
   
4. Attacking a position --Same caveats as above, and this one carries higher political risk if you are attacking an official position of your company or association. For example, if I started a series of blogs and articles attacking DITA, I would soon run afoul of IBM's goal to promote DITA. (I'm a big fan of DITA, by the way, but it provides a good example.)
   
5. Attacking a person--Always a bad idea. I've learned as a blogger and public speaker that if I need a butt for a joke, it needs to be me.
   

So in short, I think it is OK to openly discuss current topics that are still in the formative stage and it is OK to attack legacy positions whose founders are long forgotten. It's not so good to attack positions that have recently been made (if you have any association with the organization or person who has taken that position).

And when advocating a position, maintain enough public humility so that you can gracefully support the opposition should you lose the debate. By the way, a useful pattern is "Yes, I had concerns over certain issues, but I think so and so has addressed those concerns and will be sensitive to them should they arise."

The Deployment Project: Defining the Deliverables

I had the kickoff meeting yesterday with my multi-disciplinary team working on the Deployment project. As project leader, one of the first things I have tried to do is define the deliverables we will create as a result of this project. By the way, this is no small task, we have been wrestling with this as a UX department for some time now.

As preparation, I established a team Wiki in our Lotus Connections site. The thing to remember about a Wiki is "Build it and they will ho-hum." So you really need to hold meetings periodically where the Wiki is the visual tool. So I used the Wiki to collect my own thoughts, provide background info, and to present a table of the recommended deliverables. I then opened it up in edit mode during the meeting so we could incorporate team thoughts in real time. BTW, that is a trick I have learned from two colleagues who use it well (Miranda Bennett and Christie Davis), that is, use the work product and edit it in real time during the meeting. Two advantages come from this:

• You don't need to take detailed notes and then write them up after the meeting (not to mention the additional task of implementing them)
  
• You get immediate feedback about the change, as in, "Oh no, that's not what I meant."

Part of the preparation I did for the deliverables exercise was to review IBM's recommended design artifacts (from a couple of IBM sources), some of my own work on use cases, and the artifacts from a process ISS adopted about four years ago--Rapid Contextual Design. This background gave the team a box of tools so to speak to choose from.

At any rate, we have decided that we will produce the following artifacts as our design package:

• User roles and profiles
• Use case diagram
• Use cases
• Product vision (a visual/narrative representation of design ideas that emerge from our user interviews, interpretation sessions, and affinity analysis that are part of our Rapid Contextual Design process)
  
• Conceptual wire frames
• Scenarios (like use cases but more contextual and UI-specific)
  
• Deployment Guide
  
• Service Requirements Document (SRD)

The Deployment Guide will actually describe current state. This allows us to address a present gap in user documentation (I'm all about early wins that the internal client will value) while letting us hitch-hike on the user analysis and use case work the Information Developers will do as part of developing this document. It will also establish the infrastructure and information architecture that will support the future design.

The Service Requirements Document is a new deliverable we have not done before and one that was suggested during the kickoff meeting. (We have product requirement documents, but it has been my experience over several companies that PRDs come from product marketing and lack a user experience focus.) Since we have developers on the team, we can collectively define a document that puts our research and conceptual design recommendations into a format that can be easily consumed by those who must develop the design. We have long wrestled with how much detail should a design document have and how much leeway should the developers have as they work in "rubber meets the road" land. This aspect of the project could become the most exciting for me.

An interesting outcome of the meeting was the decision to remove the Due Date column from the project plan. Huh? I've argued for that for a long time--See my blog You Can't Handle the Truth. But as soon as I was made the project manager for this, wham, I was thinking dates. Part of the problem--as it was pointed out to me--was that the deliverbles would happen iteratively, for example, some use cases early, others later, etc. The other problem is that we are largely in discovery mode and must be open to follow the data when and where it takes us.

OK, no dates.

Instead, as we identify activities, I am assigning an owner and asking that person to start maintaining the Wiki page(s) that tracks activities and progress for that activity. We'll see how that goes.

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.

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.

A Birthday Poem

I am three score years upon this earth
This twenty first of May aught nine,
I pause to contemplate the worth
Of twenty-one thousand, nine hundred and fifteen days of mine.

In looking back at the seeds I've sown
It's clear that friends too few were gendered.
But the worth of those whose love I've known
Makes them all the better remembered.

So now to all who dealt me kind
So now to all who shared their ranks
Apologies if with absent mind
I have been slow in giving thanks.

Wow! What a Summit

I can't remember a more exhilarating STC Summit. Congrats to Alan Houser for pulling off a great event. The two keynotes were delightful and informative--making me excited about being a technical communicator. Unfortunately, my official duties didn't let me take in too many of the technical sessions, but I networked my little heart out.



Some IBMers at breakfast. By popular vote (at 7:30 a.m.) we decided it would be an IBMer happy hour next year. (l-r: Terri Whitt, Robert Anderson, Barrie Byron, Mike Hughes, Lori Fisher, Alyson-Kathleen Riley, Susan Becker, Mark Wallis)


Me with my fellow Fellows from IBM, Andrea Ames and Lori Fisher. It's good to be a Fellow :-)