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Emulating Vista Help with RoboHelp and Flare |
Monday |
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Rob Houser, Sage Software |
1:15 - 2:45 pm |
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Vista Help is out there, changing the way users interact with help systems and raising user expectations. Business adoption of Vista is predictably lagging behind home users; however, over the next year more help authors will be asked by their customers and management to produce help that looks like and functions like Microsoft’s Vista Help. How do we do that if Microsoft hasn’t released the Vista Help technology? It’s not as hard as you might think. In this session, you will learn how to make your help systems look and act more like Vista Help. This session will focus on emulating Vista Help features such as the color scheme, the text formatting, the page layout, information types, tone and writing style, use of show me demos, layering techniques, and user forums. The techniques in the session can be emulated using any help authoring tool; however, in this session you will receive special tips and tricks for using RoboHelp and Flare to emulate Vista Help. |
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Analyzing Your Audience, Constructing Personas and Conducting Internal Dialogs |
Monday |
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3:30 - 4:45 pm |
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A limitation of traditional audience analysis is that it asks writers to envision their audience in broad demographic categories such as age and educational background. Personas, therefore, are used to give writers a concrete description of their audience. A further enhancement, based on contemporary rhetorical theory is for writers to engage in internal dialogs with their imagined audiences or with personas. You let your audience into your head, and you "listen" to them commenting sentence by sentence on what you are writing. This is audience analysis at a much finer level of granularity. This presentation briefly reviews audience analysis and personas, briefly explains the rhetorical theory underlying the use of internal dialogs with an imagined audience, explains how to conduct internal dialogs and demonstrates the value of this technique, and employs exercises in which you practice conducting internal dialogs. — YOU WILL LEARN —
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Case Studies: Portable Usability Testing with Morae |
Tuesday |
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| This session features three separate case studies about the use of TechSmith's Morae. | 8:30 - 9:45 am |
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Moderator: Matthew Ellison, Matthew Ellison Consulting
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| Traditionally, software usability testing has been an expensive, time-consuming, and inflexible task usually involving a usability lab, computers, complicated audio and video recording equipment, and a two-way mirror. TechSmith's Morae is changing how usability testing is conducted and is making it affordable for all companies. Usability testing does not have to take place in a usability lab, and it does not have to use actual end users. This session explains how the flexibility of Techsmith's Morae can be utilized to conduct usability testing practically anywhere: in the office, at a busy user-conference, or in a hotel. |
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Using Visual Hierarchy to Convey Information |
Tuesday |
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Luke Wroblewski, Yahoo |
10:15 - 11:30 am |
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In this session, Luke will outline the way people naturally scan information pages and explain how you can guide users through key content and actions using visual hierarchy to construct meaningful, prioritized page layouts. You’ll be taken through multiple before and after examples with explanations of how a page’s content was prioritized, why, and how that priority is being communicated to users so they don’t need to rely on chance to learn how to do what they need to do.
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Double Scoop Case Studies • Theme: "Microsoft" |
Tuesday |
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| This time slot features two separate case studies by two different speakers with a common theme. | 1:00 - 2:15 pm |
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| SuperFlow Interactive Flow Charts Doug Eby, Microsoft Corporation |
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For many enterprise products, technical flowcharts can be an invaluable tool for IT Professionals to help them understand a feature or process within the product and to help them troubleshoot issues that might occur. The SuperFlow is a new concept that takes a technical flowchart to the next level by providing the following:
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| Health Models for Procedural Troubleshooting Daniel Brown, Microsoft Corporation |
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In support of the Dynamic Systems Initiative, Windows Server User Assistance is working with the Management Practices feature team and individual product teams to create a new content type, a health model, for all Windows Server 2008 server roles (for example, Terminal Services, AD RMS). First-generation health models are designed to provide IT pro customers with procedural troubleshooting content tied to specific system events; this content will be available to customers in a variety of formats, including Event Viewer-to-Web linking and MOM 2005 management packs. The Health Model project addresses a significant pain point for IT pro customers and contributes to the company's vision of self-healing systems. Learn more about developing this new content type and creating the processes and procedures to support it while working with a new set of authoring and publishing tools and requirements. |
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Techniques for Reviewing a User Interface |
Wednesday |
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Rhonda Bracey, CyberText Consulting Pty Ltd |
8:30 - 9:45 am |
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"Can you just look over these new screens for us? Oh, and can you check the error messages too? It won't take long!" If you've been asked to review a web or standalone application's user interface but don't know what to look for other than checking the text, then this session is for you. As technical communicators, we are often in a position to identify usability problems related to the logical flow, layout, and structure of the interface; inconsistencies in the design; non-compliance with standards and guidelines; ambiguous wording on labels, error messages, dialogs, and onscreen user assistance; performance issues; functional errors; and the like. Rhonda shares practical checklists of things to look for when reviewing an interface, as well as various tools that can assist you. — YOU WILL LEARN —
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Task Support Clusters: A Micro-architecture for User Assistance |
Wednesday |
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Michael Hughes, IBM Internet Security Systems |
10:00 - 11:15 am |
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Task support clusters represent a bottom-up approach to information design that focuses on optimizing the user assistance experience that starts with the user accessing page-level or tab-level context sensitive Help. This same approach can also be directly applied to embedded Help. This presentation shows detailed architectural patterns within a DITA model and demonstrates how Task Modeler, an open source tool, can be used to quickly design task support clusters and convert them into DITA maps. The presentation also discusses strategies for using this architectural approach in waterfall and iterative development environments and shows how Help files can be quickly stubbed and tested. — YOU WILL LEARN —
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Double Scoop Case Studies • Theme: "Audience Analysis" |
Wednesday |
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| This time slot features two separate case studies by two different speakers with a common theme. | 10:00 - 11:15 am |
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| From Use Cases to Help Design, Development, and Testing Jill Kerr, Greenhow Resources Inc. |
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| Jill will speak on her recent experiences in system development and the criticality of involving the Technical Writer early on as part of the Business and Requirements Analysis team in designing a Use Case template that will facilitate online help development and system/user acceptance testing later on. She will highlight the many benefits of having a Technical Writer oversee writing of use cases, and review the use cases for accuracy, completeness and usability, obtaining clarification from analysts and SMEs to ensure the requirements are communicated appropriately and unambivalently to the design team. The Technical Writer can then take the use case information and use it not only to identify functionality as an entry point to preparing a Help Table of Contents and setting up the User Help framework, but also to plan/schedule/estimate the work required and then actually document the workflow, processes, procedures, and training/tutorial material that will become the User Help. This will reduce the time later on that the Technical Writer needs to depend on SMEs for input. Jill will touch on the importance of capturing the as-is processes, areas for improvement, and future-state processes and workflow prior to writing use cases, and will describe a low-tech solution for establishing a Continuous Improvement process within an organization. |
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| The Psychology of User-"ology": Knowing Your Audience Leah Camp, SDS Healthcare |
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| Here at SDS we are focusing our development efforts directly on our customers. Our team goes on-site and interviews the staff (from CEO to the front desk workers) in order to gain a well rounded perspective of what is needed from our product and documentation. We use several components of user-centered design…combining psychology, interviewing and listening skills to ask the right questions and come back and formulate them into a product that best fits the needs of the customer. This is getting to know your audience! Our latest project using user-centered design is the Registration module. SDS supplies providers with a broad range of advanced solutions to make healthcare more efficient, effective, and profitable. We help physicians, hospitals and clinics upgrade their medical records into electronic medical records and we also offer an entire document management system. The Registration module is the first step in the SDS suite of products and used by the front-desk registration clerks. We developed personas, context scenarios, and use case briefs based on the actual users. We looked at the environment, background and interfacing people and products. We took all of this information and designed the product around their needs. |
