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Friend or Foe? The Role of Web 2.0 in User Assistance |
Monday |
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Sarah O'Keefe, Scriptorium Publishing Services, Inc. |
3:30 - 4:45 pm |
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This session examines different perspectives on several Web 2.0 technologies and how they might affect your efforts to support your users. Wikis, RSS, search, forums...are they a threat or an opportunity for user assistance professionals? Content control? You don't have any. This isn't good, especially if you have product liability concerns. Users tend to document specific scenarios rather than the big picture. Corporate documentation needs to cover the basics -- procedures and concepts. How do you compete with people who aren't afraid to say that "that feature doesn't work"? Candor is compelling. Your biggest competitor is a Google search, so you need to make sure your information turns up in a Google search. These types of issues and more will be explored in this look at emerging technologies. — YOU WILL LEARN —
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Making Business Blogging Work with your UA |
Tuesday |
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Jeanie DuMont, Microsoft Corp. |
8:30 - 9:45 am |
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In this session we will discuss how you can successfully incorporate blogging into your overall user assistance strategy - without feeling like you are losing control of your message - using a the adCenter blog as a real world example. This session will share current practices currently in use, including editorial processes to continually create fresh content, getting buy-in from within your organization, understanding the needs of your audience, monitoring success, and of course, pitfalls to avoid.
— YOU WILL LEARN —
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Guiding Principles of Googley Design |
Tuesday |
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Jon Wiley, Google |
10:15 - 11:30 am |
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Google's primary guiding philosophy is "focus on the user and all else will follow." Google aims to satisfy and delight people all over the world by designing products that are universal, fast, innovative, trustworthy, and personable. This session will introduce the fundamental principles that guide Google in designing great user experiences and include examples of how Google implements those principles. — YOU WILL LEARN —
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The Potential of Web 2.0 for User Assistance |
Tuesday |
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Scott Boggan, Isilon Systems |
1:00 - 2:15 pm |
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This session examines popular "Web 2.0" technologies and examines their broad potential for providing richer and more collaborative web-based user assistance. We'll assess the current and future impact of information delivery technologies—such as AJAX, RSS, and recommendation systems—and describe how each can provide greater levels of interactivity for users and between systems. We'll also examine collaborative technologies such as folksonomies, tag clouds, wikis, and community forums, and consider their impact on us as authors. — YOU WILL LEARN —
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Integrating Different Types of User Assistance with On-Demand Software |
Tuesday |
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Andrea Leszek, salesforce.com |
1:00 - 2:15 pm |
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This case study examines the different types of user assistance that salesforce.com offers to users of our on-demand CRM software, focusing on how that user assistance is integrated to create the best user experience. The types of user assistance include tip sheets, implementation guides, user guides, context-sensitive help, FAQs, user interface instructions, a Customer Support Portal, best practices, and multimedia presentations. This session discusses how we determined which types of user assistance to offer by employing a combination of usability studies, user surveys, user research, real-time usage metrics, and gut instincts. It examines why we chose to offer different types of assistance and how we worked closely with the Development team to accomplish this. This session also highlights the pros and cons of having the user assistance tightly integrated with the software, and discusses the challenges and benefits of creating user assistance for on-demand software.
— YOU WILL LEARN —
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Web 2.0 in a Corporate Environment: Roles and Tasks of a Technical Communicator |
Tuesday |
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2:45 - 4:00 pm |
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Many companies are exploring the possibilities of integrating the concepts and tools behind Web 2.0 in a corporate environment — externally to enable the users' community and internally to support knowledge sharing and management. This session will explore current practices used by a number of prominent corporations, the organizational process used to enable the practices, the roles and tasks technical communicators can take in the initiatives, and the impact the initiatives have on technical communication departments inside the corporations. — YOU WILL LEARN —
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The Wikibooks Paradigm for Collaborative Content Creation |
Tuesday |
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Andrew Whitworth, Wikibooks |
2:45 - 4:00 pm |
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The Wikibooks project was created as an offshoot of the popular Wikipedia project in 2003. Tasked with creating open-content textbooks and manuals, volunteer editors have written large volumes of book content and created a thriving online community of authors, editors, and administrators. This session will discuss the challenges and solutions of wiki-based content creation, issues specific to software-related books, and goals for the future. — YOU WILL LEARN —
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Designing Best-in-Class Embedded User Assistance |
Wednesday |
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Scott DeLoach, User First Services • Hands-on, Double Session |
8:30 - 11:30 am |
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In this session, we will discuss how to design, write, and implement embedded field-level, procedural, and conceptual user assistance. We will also examine best-in-class examples of web-based embedded user assistance (UA), with a focus on AJAX and Web 2.0. This hands-on session will give attendees a chance to design an embedded UA system based on the best practice guidelines and best-in-class examples we discuss. Hands-on activities will include designing embedded UA for new products, adding embedded UA to existing products, writing embedded UA topics, and coding context-sensitive embedded UA (a laptop is useful but not required). — YOU WILL LEARN —
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An Essential Toolkit for Information Architects |
Wednesday |
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8:30 - 9:15 am |
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Many technical communicators are involved in information architecture projects. This session demonstrates a proven information architecture toolkit with methods and tools to use in a project of almost any size. Included are tools to gather and organize informational, functional and non-functional requirements, to conduct the content analysis, to improve communication with the client and the development team, and information architecture evaluation tools. Practical examples from several projects of various scale will be shown. — YOU WILL LEARN —
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Using Web 2.0 to Distribute Key Knowledge |
Wednesday |
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James Keller, ISITE Design |
1:15 - 2:45 pm |
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This session will serve as a practical guide to professionals who want to use web 2.0 tools to distribute key knowledge in an enterprise setting by outlining how to overcome cultural and executive resistance while showing the value this proven approach. Learn the back story and process by which ISITE Design created a web portal to serve as the primary information resource for the sales and marketing staff of one of Siemens AG's billion-dollar divisions. Learn about the challenges of implementation and adoption inherent in the deployment of a site that uses content and document management, user-generated content, folksonomies, online communities, and ratings &mdash: all available on six global sites in nearly a dozen languages. Beyond highlighting functional and technical parts of the effort, audience participation will help envision how a "Web 2.0-meets-the-enterprise" approach could provide a powerful answer to their knowledge management problems and promote user self-help. — YOU WILL LEARN —
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