Mary Connor's blog

How quickly the computing world is changing

Mary Connor — Thu, 19 Jan 2012 12:33:31 -0500

Here is a great visualization of how rapidly our technology is changing. These steep velocities speak volumes about how disruptive the rise of mobile devices has been, and is:

Tip: How to import Excel spreadsheets into iMIS Community

Mary Connor — Wed, 19 Oct 2011 13:49:16 -0400

If you would like to bring in a spreadsheet as an editable table in iMIS Community, you can do so in a few steps:

In Excel, select and copy the range of rows and columns you want to bring over.
In iMIS Community, click the Paste from Word (clipboard + W) button on the editor toolstrip.
In the dialog that pops up, paste in your rows and columns and click OK.

That is the process for importing it. However, to make the table display correctly and be editable via the WYSIWYG options (such as to insert/delete rows), a bit more clean-up will get you there:

Webinar: Managing technical debt in Agile

Mary Connor — Fri, 14 Jan 2011 11:05:07 -0500

This week I attended a webinar on "Managing Technical Debt with Agile" by Michael Hall, of Three Beacons. “Technical Debt” often comes from choosing a design approach for expedience that, over time, increases complexity and costs. The financial metaphor is that of credit: to get something now, pay for it later, but with interest — which can worsen to the point that all money (effort) is going into servicing that debt, which can never be paid off. Mike offered three areas of suggestions: how to prevent new debt from occurring, how to deal with new debt that happens, and how to bring down legacy debt:

Agile Austin: Resources for learning the method

Mary Connor — Tue, 22 Jun 2010 11:51:56 -0400

Agile Austin has put together a nice collection of resources for learning agile development practices: http://www.agileaustin.org/agile-resources/

It recommends books, websites, listservs, blogs, videos, and podcasts, to support many learning styles. It also links to tools that members have recommended for use with agile.

Tools to check web accessibility

Mary Connor — Fri, 30 Oct 2009 23:44:17 -0400

Testing and correcting accessibility problems throughout the development process is all about tools. Here are tips I've collected:

Support the fewest back versions of JAWS you can: just as with browsers, supporting earlier versions makes development infinitely harder. Current version is 11.
Fangs is a free screen-reader emulator, a Firefox plugin: http://www.standards-schmandards.com/projects/fangs/
Study Juicy Studio (http://juicystudio.com/) for Javascript accessibility fixes: they've figured out tons.
Use Juicy Studio accessibility plugins and toolbar: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/user/320.
WebAIM now has an accessibility toolbar: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/6720.
There's also a free Web Accessibility Toolbar for IE: http://www.paciellogroup.com/resources/wat-ie-about.html

Finding more tools:

InnoTech Austin: Business and Technology Conference and Expo, Oct 29

Mary Connor — Thu, 01 Oct 2009 14:25:58 -0400

October 29, 2009 is the 6th annual InnoTech Austin event, held at the Austin Convention Center. It's a one-day blast of talks, demonstrations, summits, and expo, which is a steal at $35.

With its focus on innovation, this conference is a handy barometer for business and technology trends. This year, there is new attention being paid to start-ups ("Austin Startup Row"), and the Beta Summit will present live demos of six of the hottest technologies being developed in Austin. The Software track this year is emphasizing social networking and cost-savings, and there are sessions on Windows 7 and Google Wave.

Tips from usability research

Mary Connor — Thu, 24 Sep 2009 13:36:13 -0400

10 Useful Usability Findings and Guidelines summarizes research findings that have a practical impact on how we design interfaces. The article includes visual examples for these findings:

Form labels work best above the field
Users focus on faces
Quality of design indicates credibility
Most users do not scroll (but more and more do)
Blue is the best color for links
The ideal search box is 27 characters wide
White space improves comprehension
Effective user testing can be very cheap
Informative product pages win
Most users are blind to advertising

In addition, the article includes case study findings about typography (line height, space, length), blogs, forms, and portfolios. Worth a read!

Sequenced images for technical communication

Mary Connor — Wed, 09 Sep 2009 12:19:32 -0400

Last night Alan Porter explained to STC Austin "Why Tech Writers Shouldn't Be Writers". Much of it focused on the use of comics for technical communication, but not comics in the sense of "humorous drawings" -- rather, comics as sequential images that tell a story. Most tech writers are painfully aware that their users would rather have a few annotated screenshots than written descriptions and procedures, but that's not a problem so much as a brain-based reality, he argues. Alan pointed out:

Zinepal: On-demand magazine formatting of online documentation

Mary Connor — Fri, 14 Aug 2009 15:07:36 -0400

A long-time wish for many of us building and using online documentation is how to grab only the portions we want and have it lay out well for print production, handouts, quick references. A new tool, Zinepal ("magazine pal"), attempts just that: it lets you create your own PDFs -- and even schedule daily rebuilds -- from online content. In an email, Zinepal staff claimed that 1-column layouts would be a quick enhancement, that the easiest way to leverage this tool for documentation is to set up RSS feeds exactly the way you want content to be grouped, and that more integration options are in the works. But as it stands today, it's a compelling example of how to give documentation producers and end users the power to build exactly what they need from online content.

Simplifying browser jumping: Firefox's IE Tab

Mary Connor — Tue, 30 Jun 2009 12:34:22 -0400

I've just installed Firefox's wildly popular IE Tab add-on, which promises to make my life easier! The problems:

remembering to always open certain applications and sites in IE
doing without functionality (such as Window Resizer) I have in Firefox only
needing to quickly toggle a given URL between both browsers, for testing

The solution is this add-on that hosts Internet Explorer inside of Firefox and allows you to control which browser context is used for which site. (That is, open the site via FF, and it launches in the right browser; one right-click lets me toggle between browsers.) Sites I run in IE include Sonexis (web conferencing), Outlook Web Access, and the iMIS Full view (.../imis15/admin). Some tips:

May 30, Dallas: Big Design conference (UX)

Mary Connor — Thu, 23 Apr 2009 10:22:55 -0400

http://bigdesignconference.com/

$50 ($20 w/ student ID), 9:00 to 6:00, May 30, 2009, SMU campus

The Big (D)esign conference is a 1-day blast in Dallas, TX, focusing on convergence among social media, user experience, and code development. It's jointly sponsored by Dallas chapters of the Usability Professional Association, Refresh, and the Interaction Design Association (IxDA). Keynoting will be Norm Cox, one of the UX stars of the Xerox Palo Alto Research Center.

UA2009: Moving documentation into wikis

Mary Connor — Tue, 07 Apr 2009 12:13:18 -0400

Another strong theme running through the Software User Assistance 2009 conference was that any Help and documentation not embedded into the interface itself is moving into wikis, as much for their new media support (particularly RSS) as for the compelling efficiencies and benefits of collaborative authoring.

Matthew Smith (CorVel) presented on "Using SharePoint as a User Assistance Platform". SharePoint (aka MOSS) is becoming a platform for portal-based community and collaboration, with its built-in support for fast site development, including custom lists, blogs, wikis, surveys, search, and document version control. He was able to easily publish content from RoboHelp and Captivate directly into SharePoint, and SharePoint's security model was granular enough for him to control who sees what, down to the document and item level. SharePoint became their wiki-plus one-stop-shopping for content, unifying all documentation and support access. His recommendations:

UA2009: Glimpsing Microsoft Help 3

Mary Connor — Mon, 06 Apr 2009 17:52:19 -0400

Very exciting for me was the chance to hear April Reagan, a Program Manager at Microsoft Corporation, make the first public announcement about the release of Help 3, the ground-up redevelopment of Microsoft's Help format that she championed and won Bill Gate's backing for in 2007.

Microsoft Help, of course, has been foundering for years, and the 2.x versions devolved into problematic (slow, spotty, irrelevant, click-intensive, complicated, inefficient, confusing) Visual Studio-only formats. Once April won resources for the project to fix it, she did intensive data mining to research how Help needed to change, arriving at this UX vision: "Help is so quick and easy I can find the right answer on the first try." Her internal goals broke out into four areas:

UA2009: Leveraging DITA-based tools

Mary Connor — Mon, 06 Apr 2009 16:02:47 -0400

Another central message of the Software User Assistance 2009 conference was that DITA (created and donated by IBM) offers a useful open-source standard for structuring and managing documentation, perhaps more for its tool support than for its inherent merits. Several presenters who had issues with its information typing nevertheless used it because of tool support.

UA2009: Embedded user assistance (help in context)

Mary Connor — Mon, 06 Apr 2009 14:15:53 -0400

One of the central messages of the Software User Assistance 2009 conference was that Help must move into the UI itself (embedded user assistance).

Scott DeLoach (ClickStart), in his presentation "Best Practices for Embedded User Assistance", said the goal to fix Help is to [1] HIDE in plain sight, [2] PREDICT questions, [3] PREVENT problems, and [4] SEDUCE users into opening the Help they need. Research shows that [1] users simply won't ask for help, [2] they don't perceive embedded help as Help, and [3] they do use embedded help, so it has strong ROI.

UA2009: Documentation's changing world

Mary Connor — Mon, 06 Apr 2009 12:30:16 -0400

The Software User Assistance 2009 conference in Seattle explored deeply how the entire field is changing and how our deliverables and methods can and must change.

Tony Self, in his presentation "What if the reader can't read?", sounded the alarm about changes in our users. Beyond the worsening literacy of the emerging workforce, the general increase in reader impatience is dooming traditional documentation. The Akami study (2006) showed that 75% of people would not go back to a site that took more than 4 seconds to load, where only a few years earlier it was 8 seconds. Given that 4 seconds is about 15 words read, it doesn't bode well for textual deliverables. Other studies show that web reading not only degrades our ability to read thoroughly, but it changes how we think and consume information. Increasingly, we're power browsers, not readers. What to do? Given our readers' move towards skimming information horizontally, reading snippets of text from different sources rather than in-depth, vertical reading, we need to change what we deliver.

Link: Writing for Reuse

Mary Connor — Mon, 02 Mar 2009 11:26:27 -0500

Jakob Nielsen's Alertbox post, Write for Reuse, argues for changing how we write to accommodate the well-researched fact that users will discover and approach a given page in a myriad of ways. The critical importance of how we word titles and headings is part of it, but I was caught by his argument to craft the opening text carefully, as users read only this in many cases, to judge whether this is the right page to answer their question/problem. I realized that I do this myself (read the intro quickly to evaluate the merit of staying on the page).

Sessions for 2008 Nonprofit Software Development Summit

Mary Connor — Mon, 20 Oct 2008 10:21:46 -0400

The sessions are posted for the 2008 Nonprofit Software Development Summit, which is November 17-19 in Oakland, California:

http://devsummit08.aspirationtech.org/index.php?title=Sessions_List

It's an interesting window into what developers at nonprofits are excited about. Technical training is focusing on Joomla!, Drupal, CiviCRM, and Ruby on Rails. Documentation topics are focusing on FLOSS Manuals and book sprints.

Easy screenshots via Firefox add-on

Mary Connor — Wed, 24 Sep 2008 13:27:24 -0400

Here's an easy, free, cross-platform solution for grabbing screenshots of web content: Screengrab, a Firefox add-on. It includes a great feature once found only in high-end tools: It can capture an entire page/frame, including the portions that fall below the scroll. After you install Screengrab, you see an icon down in your status bar:

Free web conferencing, cross-platform, no participant install: Yuuguu

Mary Connor — Wed, 10 Sep 2008 18:13:30 -0400

The problem: Our trainer had a MacBook and no connector to use our projector, and she couldn't use our Windows-based conferencing software.

The solution: Yuuguu. It works on Windows, MacOS, and Linux, and with IE, Firefox, and Safari. Only the host needs to install anything; participants simply browse to the meeting URL and enter the correct pin to join in -- a fabulous feature, as I didn't have admin rights on the computer in our meeting room. If I were able to install Yuuguu, we could have gotten control of the web conference and shared our desktop, for full collaborative work.