Using Adobe Acrobat 9 Pro and Adobe Presenter to Create Superior Documents and Training

Sunday

Joe Ganci, Dazzle Technologies Corp.

1:00 - 4:30pm

During this hands-on class, you will learn and practice how to use the latest version of Adobe Acrobat to its full potential, allowing you to deliver media-rich and interactive documents. You will see how to use Adobe Acrobat and Adobe Presenter to enhance your technical documents and even allow for training applications within your documents, letting users try tasks themselves.

You will learn how to use Adobe Acrobat to:

• Incorporate video and audio directly in PDF documents
• Create Adobe PDF Portfolios for more navigable and attractive documents.
• Include interactive elements and tasks to engage users.
• Create a true immersive experience and deliver it through a standard PDF document.

You will also learn how to use Adobe Presenter to deliver even more immersive content. You will learn how to:

• Start with PowerPoint slides and add audio narration
• Further add Flash content and videos
• Create quiz questions quickly and easily, grouping and randomizing questions
• Track learner progress and send to a Learning Management System
• Communicate and collaborate, delivering information, documentation, media elements and interactivity securely and effectively to almost anyone, anywhere.
• Protect sensitive information and deliver information and training easily anywhere in the world.

Embedded User Assistance: Where Does It Belong?

Monday

Rob Houser, Sage

10:30 - 11:30am

When users are busy trying to get something done with an application, they often resent being interrupted to go search through the help to find the answer to their question. Information designers have been moving user assistance into the user interface, so users don't have to go far or exert much effort to get the answers they need and keep working. But where does that user assistance belong in the user interface? This presentation looks at the latest trends and research in the placement of embedded user assistance and provides guidance about who needs what content and where they need it.

— YOU WILL LEARN —

• Where to put field descriptions, screen introductions, conceptual explanations, procedures, and tips and tricks
• How to layer user assistance
• How to know when there is too much embedded user assistance
• Strategies for getting development on-board for implementing embedded user assistance

Monday

12:45 - 1:45 pm

This class is a case study of how our company's small Documentation team developed a means of gathering direct user feedback on our Help system from 20-30 users for under $300. In fact, our usability test was so popular in its first year that we now conduct one on an annual basis at our Users' Conference, and the information we receive from our clients provides us with insight to the end-user experience that would otherwise be impossible to predict. We then take this information and put it to work for us as we strive to offer the best user experience possible. We are not afraid to ask the question: "Just how helpful is our Help?" The case study includes an overview of our usability test process: how we create it, how we conduct it, how we follow up with users, and how we implement the results.

Working with a user-interface designer, I spent several months using design principles to investigate ideas for integrated user assistance. We used surveys and in-depth, real-time, online customer interviews to find out how customers use our current help resources and to test our ideas for new methods. While the surveys gave us some good information, the real value was in watching people try to solve problems using our documentation. We are now implementing changes to Help for several products, based on our findings. Find out how you can get feedback from your users to ensure that you are providing the best help for your customer base.

Strategies for Web-based User Assistance

Monday

Scott DeLoach, ClickStart

3:25 - 4:25pm

In this session, I will demonstrate multiple techniques for creating web-based user assistance. We will discuss how to display user assistance using tooltips, popups, and UA panels, how to display content that is stored in databases, help topics, and other files, and how to allow users to annotate, edit, and rank UA content. Attendees will be able to download working examples that they can adapt for their own projects.

— YOU WILL LEARN —

• How to create sliding, expanding, fading, and collapsing UA
• How to pull content from databases or other pages
• How to automatically add UA topic previews
• How to allow users to annote, edit, and rank content

Think Simple - A Minimalist Approach to User Assistance

Tuesday

Scott Nesbitt, DMN Communications

8:30 - 9:30am

For many technical communicators, online user assistance is a dump of a user manual (with a few tweaks) into a different format. It should be more than that, and in some ways less than that. Today's web-enabled world has changed the expectations around user assistance. Applications require a help model that's not mired with complicated navigation or unnecessary information, and an inflexible delivery platform. Help should be simple, flexible, and to the point.

By looking at what user assistance currently is and what it could be, Scott Nesbitt will look at a number of ways in which you can deliver streamlined, minimal documentation that focuses not on the what, but on the how.

— YOU WILL LEARN —

• Some of the shortcomings of the universally-accepted model of user assistance
• Why simple doesn't mean incomplete
• Ways in which to give users the information they want, in the way they need it
• How technologies like RSS, wikis, and blogs can enrich the overall user experience

From Info Strategy to Info Types

Tuesday

Bob Boiko, Metatorial Services Inc.

9:50 - 10:50am

In this talk, drawn from work done with the Harvard Business School, I will present a method for deriving a set of information (or content) types that are founded on solid business value. Items of the types are obtainable from the current IT systems. The types can form the basis of an overall information management framework by being tied to users, systems, web sites and other publications, and workflow practices.

Lessons Learned from Building Google Webmaster Central

Tuesday

Vanessa Fox, Nine By Blue

1:25 - 2:25pm

When we set out to improve the conversation between Google and site owners, we faced quite a few challenges, not the least of which was the wide range of audiences (developers, marketers, and a host of others) and their varying skill levels (from "I can pwn your site" to "I think the blink tag is awesome"), multiplied by the 70 million active sites on the web. We had to build scalability in from the start and over time built a portal that combined foundational educational content, a toolset that provided customized diagnostic detail, a discussion forum that enabled site owners to help each other, for us to be alerted of issues, and for our responses to be more scalably useful than one-on-one responses, and a blog to dive into specific issues. A key component not immediately obvious from the portal was outreach to media and key audience groups through conference appearances. Our success was at least partially due to our multi-pronged approach and use of Google Webmaster Central and the Sitemaps protocol are now standard practice for many commercial web sites.

— YOU WILL LEARN —

• How we gathered audience and business needs and built requirements that addressed both as well as how to approach this task for your own organization
• About our phased approach that enabled us to launch quickly and iterate over time
• How we used a combination of people and automation to provide support at scale
• How we got buy in from key internal groups and we able to leverage their help by ultimately reducing their overhead

Where User Experience and Software Engineering Meet

Tuesday

Andrew Ko, University of Washington

1:25 - 2:25pm

Most academic research about software focuses on either the lives of developers or the lives of users. In my research, I try to focus on where users' and developers' lives intersect, studying the challenges that users have in communicating problems to software companies, and the challenges that developers have in making sense of users' experiences. In this talk, I will survey my research on these topics, describing some of the problems and trends I have discovered and some of the technologies I have invented to address these problems. These include a variety of studies of corporate software development, and several new tools that make it easier to debug and diagnose problems with software.

— YOU WILL LEARN —

• About ongoing academic research on bug reporting, quality assurance, and automatic help tools
• Insights about the challenges of user-centered software development work

Tuesday

1:25 - 2:25pm

David will discuss the pros and cons of Declarative authoring of eLearning using XML. He will introduce you to the essential schema elements required to author in XML and share his insights for how to markup those elements. Additionally, David will walk through the basic requirements of an eLearning engine developed in Flash or Silverlight including parsing, rendering, sequencing and interacting. David will further discuss strategies for XML production which include forms editors as well as custom desktop editors. Finally, David will discuss his lessons learned implementing this approach within large companies. David will share numerous examples and demonstrate sample tools that he has created throughout his presentation.

This presentation demonstrates how to integrate Adobe's RoboHelp and Captivate tools to create an e-learning application using the Show Me, Guide Me, and Test Me teaching methodology. A structured base for learning material, combined with a global navigation system, enables users to learn at their own pace and allows them to select modules in an appropriate order for their job training. Maintenance of your application is critical and should be built into your design, in order to keep current with the latest version of your software.

A Semantic Approach to Embedding UA in "Active" Documents

Wednesday

Michael Kohlhase, Jacobs University Bremen

9:50 - 10:50am

We present a novel, semantic approach to embedding User Assistance facilities into "Active Documents" - i.e. documents like programs that can be executed or have interactive features like spreadsheets, specifications, or PowerPoint presentations. Instead of enhancing web resources into semi-formal ontologies by annotating them with formal objects that allow reasoning as in the "Semantic Web" paradigm, the "Semantic Illustration" architecture illustrates a software artifact with a semi-formal background ontology by complementing it with enough information to render new semantic services in a "Semantic Ally System". We illustrate the Semantic Illustration approach with spreadsheets as they are heavily employed in administration, financial forecasting, education, and science, but have severe problems with usability and software engineering. We show how a theory-structured background ontology can be used to provide user assistance at various levels by employing methods. We identify the property of "semantic transparency" as a user interface prerequisite of Semantic Illustration and discuss it in the context of office applications.

— YOU WILL LEARN —

• About an exciting new approach to user assistance
• How UA can be given for a spreadsheet not just for Excel
• How a user's task experience can be modeled

Turning Seach into Find

Wednesday

Matthew Ellison, Matthew Ellison Consulting

2:25 - 3:25pm

If you offer users of Help the choice of using the table of contents, index, or search to locate the information they need, most will opt for Search. And yet very often Search yields disappointingly poor results, ranging from an unhelpfully long list of hits to nothing at all. This leads to negative attitudes towards Help and a tendency for users to look for answers in alterative sources.

This session explores a range of emerging techniques for improving the quality a Help system's search feature, making it more focused and less likely to return "Not found" results. Techniques include auto-suggest, faceted search, and support for targeting keyword metadata. The benefits of these techniques include a better chance of users finding the information they need in Help, reports of more positive experiences with Help, an increased uptake of Help, and more productive users as a result.

— YOU WILL LEARN —

• The key criteria for assessing the quality of a search system
• The critical role of metadata in improving search results
• Other emerging techniques for making search more usable, relevant and accurate
• How the search features of various Help formats including HTML Help, WebHelp, AIR Help, NetHelp, and the new Microsoft Help 3 format measure up with each other
• What to look for in a third party search engine, and what's currently available