Embedding User Experience in the Product Development Life Cycle

Monday

Michael Hughes, IBM Security Services

10:30 - 11:30am

All UX professionals, not just user assistance developers, face the problem of integrating their work into the product development life cycle. At lower levels of organizational usability maturity, too often, the contributions of User Experience tend to be reactive. Usability professionals test the usability of a given product, then designers mitigate any shortcomings they find, and user assistance developers merely document what is already there. This presentation takes a look at the full scope of the product development lifecycle and how UX professionals can add value.

— YOU WILL LEARN —

• How to articulate the ways UX can have a positive influence in the following development phases:
  • requirements definition
  • design and validation
  • development and testing
  • deployment and support

Improving Your Online Help with Topic Type Patterns

Monday

Linda Urban, Linda Urban Communications, LLC

12:45 - 1:45pm

When you develop content as Help topics, you are already creating modular topics. But writing content in separate topics doesn't by itself guarantee all the benefits you can get from using a topic-based approach.

At the heart of topic-based authoring is the idea of developing an information model that includes topic types and patterns. Defining these patterns helps you develop and present information in a consistent manner, which improves the usability of your content. Once you have designed your information model, you can implement it in your help authoring tool and apply it as you write.

— YOU WILL LEARN —

• "Benefits of developing and using an information model
• How to assess whether your Help already follows a topic-based approach
• How to figure out what types of topics make sense for your content
• How to use templating features in your authoring tools, to help apply a topic-based approach"

Writing Help for Software Trial Versions

Monday

Michael Hughes, IBM Security Services

2:05 - 3:05pm

Most of the time, User Assistance doesn't come into play until after the user or the user's company, has bought the product. There is a common scenario, however, where User Assistance has a real opportunity to influence the buying decision, and that is when the software is marketed by providing free, time-boxed, demo versions. In these cases, the usability of the product takes a more influential role and User Assistance can manage the user experience during this critical judgement window.

This presentation describes some of the special considerations User Assistance writers should give to supporting the user's trial experience.

— YOU WILL LEARN —

• The key influences on user adoption (based on Rogers' principles of Diffusion of Innovations)
• How the trial user experience is different from the ""bought and paid for"" user experience
• How to tailor User Assistance for the trial user experience
• How to market internally how User Assistance is supporting Sales

User Annotations with HTML5

Monday

Dave Gash, HyperTrain

3:25 - 4:25pm

Way back in the olden days (circa 1995), users could add their own annotations to RTF-based WinHelp. Then along came HTML-based help, soon followed by WebHelp, and user annotations became practically impossible to implement. But with HTML5's local storage feature, user annotations are once again a practical and useful content-enhancement device. This session explores local storage and shows how your users can add their own notes to your WebHelp topics or Web pages. We'll see how to save and load user annotations, persist them across sessions, associate them with individual pages, and even share them among pages. After all these years, annotations are back, baby -- and better than ever!

— YOU WILL LEARN —

• How the HTML5 localStorage object works
• How to save and retrieve user annotations
• How to associate annotations with specific pages
• How to add an attractive annotation area to your pages

Dealing with Subject Matter Experts in the Design Process

Tuesday

Kevin Moore, TiER1 Performance Solutions

8:30 - 9:30am

If it wasn't for the lack of time, incoherent slides and content, and the fun of dealing with a curmudgeon Subject Matter Expert (SME) this experience would be a delight! Understand how to work with the SME, how to keep them in the role of a SME, and how to get the organization (key people) to allot time so your product is successful. Dealing with subject matter experts is often a very time consuming and difficult process that sometimes ends up being a waste of time for you and for the subject matter expert. However, gathering data from people who know about your topic and are considered "experts" is a crucial activity and if done correctly can pay big dividends for your project. In this session we will discuss a "research" approach to gathering data leveraging subject matter experts in the process. In this presentation a discussion of the overall data gathering process, methods for gathering specific data, validity / reliability of data, and the application of cognitive task analysis in dealing with SMEs. If you've ever sat in one of these SME meetings and felt highly frustrated then come to this session!

— YOU WILL LEARN —

• Leverage a method for working with a Subject Matter Expert for efficiency and effectiveness
• Reduce the time necessary in working with a SME
• Leverage CTA in working with a SME to understand their audience
• Keep the SME in their role while you do yours

Adding Gusto to Glossaries

Tuesday

Leah Guren, Cow TC

9:50 - 10:50am

Glossaries are a great way to span the needs of different user experience levels in your Help system. But a glossary is only as good as the quality of its definitions.

This interactive workshop lets you test your skill at defining technical terms and finding creative analogies for complex concepts. This is hands-on workshop, so come prepared to write, refine, and reveal!

— YOU WILL LEARN —

• The true role of definitions and analogies in the user experience
• The three key elements to every good definition
• The best practices for dealing with acronyms and initializations
• Methods for explaining complex concepts through analogies

Using Neuroscience Research for Better Knowledge Transfer

Tuesday

Kevin Moore, TiER1 Performance Solutions

11:10am - 12:10pm

At the end of this session you and you alone will be able to single handedly put a group of people to sleep with your discussion on Neuroscience. However, because you know the latest and greatest research in this area you will know exactly HOW to keep them awake, engaged, and enlightened. In the past 10 years the research in neuroscience has exploded with concepts and realities that foundationally shape the way we understand how a human acquires knowledge, what they do with errors, and how to link knowledge to performance. This will be a fun and engaging way to explore the mind and begin understanding how a person develops schemas and understanding those schemas can help you unlock performance. Understanding this foundational research will allow you to better understand your audience and why people do the things they do.

— YOU WILL LEARN —

• Understand the basics of Neuroscience and the application to Performance
• Why Schemas develop and why they begin to form behaviors
• Why people fear change and what to do about it
• How understanding a little of the functions of the mind can help you do your job better

Needs Analysis for UA Professionals

Tuesday

Leah Guren, Cow TC

1:25 - 2:25pm

Do you confidently update your product's Help but struggle with projects that require ground-up development? Sometimes, figuring out what you need to create can seem like an insurmountable obstacle!

This session covers the basics of performing needs analysis, the process of determining what exactly has to be documented in the Help, and how. This is also an important component in estimating and budgeting.

— YOU WILL LEARN —

• Handy shortcuts for starting the analysis
• To identify the main content categories
• How to use personas as a cyclical analysis
• How to map user workflow to task analysis
• To use the analysis results for project estimation

Using Iterative Design and Usability to Create Intuitive Applications

Tuesday

Leanne Logan, FedEx

2:45 - 3:45pm

Engaging customers in the development of the software targeted to their use will lead to much more intuitive software. Developing early prototypes with one or two or more options allows the team to conceptually visualize the product they are charged with building. Showing customers these early prototypes provides the team with the directional feedback to know the product is on the right track, while still offering the flexibility to throw away designs that don't work and rethink the best way to position the features.

Using the iterative design and usability method results in the best GUI experience for your customers. Following this process need not take long, cost much, or involve too many users. The mere engagement of customers in the creation of a product for their use will help identify the best user experience.

In this session, Leanne will walk through a model for using iterative design and usability through 2-3 cycles to identify the best user experience. They will illustrate the process through examples of before and after designs used to develop FedEx.com Shipping and other customer applications. This how-to session laced with real world examples will illustrate the value and share with attendees they whys and hows of integrating the user's voice when developing the digital user experience.

— YOU WILL LEARN —

• An iterative process they can employ to build the best customer experience into a software application
• The value of their time and skills early in the design and development cycle
• How usability practitioners can successfully lead the way for the design and product development, steering business and IT teams towards success
• A variety of usability techniques used to capture the user's needs and design the best user experience

Integrating Help, Technical Support, and Training Content

Tuesday

Paul Mueller, UserAid

2:45 - 3:45pm

This session identifies a way to integrate online Help, technical support knowledge base, and online training video content. During this session, we will review the support.smartvault.com web site and talk about the process of creating this information center. We will also explore several technologies, such as Google Analytics, Google Custom Search, and WordPress. This session provides various lessons learned during this project and describes ways to bring these related content areas together.

— YOU WILL LEARN —

• How WordPress and Google Custom Search helped users find the content they need
• How Google Analytics helps the content team identify how often each topic is viewed
• How to use WordPress to publish and maintain Technical Support Knowledge Base content
• How to create one place to go for your users to find the answers they need

Improve User Productivity with Just-in-Time Advice

Wednesday

Rob Houser, Sage

8:30 - 9:30am

In this session, you will see how Sage built an electronic performance support system to improve user productivity and find out how you can use these same techniques to improve user performance with your software and build a brand around how your company interacts with users.

— YOU WILL LEARN —

• What type of assistance improves productivity
• Where and when advice should be delivered
• How and why you should measure productivity gains

Minimalist Writing to Improve Writing and Translation Workflows

Wednesday

Bernard Aschwanden, Publishing Smarter

9:50 - 10:50am

AGFA HealthCare learned and applied minimalism best practices and reduced complexity, word count, and translation costs by improving their source content. When you reduce the source word count you can improve readability at the same time and help everyone. Readers get a clear, consistent message; writers focus on the core task of creating content; translators focus on the exact message to deliver; your company reduces translation costs and translations are faster. Learn how it happened. Review before and after samples. See the numbers and identify exactly what types of savings were realized.

Automating the Localization of Multimedia

Wednesday

Cecilia Dobner, Autodesk

1:05 - 2:05pm

With the increase in the use of multimedia elements in User Assistance documentation, localization teams are faced with a need for cost effective solutions and streamlined processes and tools to offer the same experience worldwide. Autodesk Localization Services has been working for many years in refining and enhancing a process that allows us to automate screenshooting, which is used for all languages, including English. This presentation will give an overview of the automation process, but it will also describe how videos are processed and finally how we can save cost by replacing words with visual elements, providing these are well globalized.

— YOU WILL LEARN —

• About graphic automation
• Different video recording tools for technical documentation
• How to avoid localization cost increases when creating graphics and/or videos

Metrics to Document the Costs of Documentation

Wednesday

Bernard Aschwanden, Publishing Smarter

2:25 - 3:25pm

Metrics help identify the time, money, and resources of any project. Documentation metrics provide clear and unbiased data to quantify costs. Learn to calculate metrics, and identify where they can be reused. Define metrics for writing (including traditional chapter based and reusable topics) and present them in various ways-beyond just a "per page" model. Know your costs and be in control of requests for new resources, updates to procedure, changes in software tools, and much more. Present from a position of authority knowing the time, money, and resources your changes will save.