Presenters: Janice (Ginny) Redish, Whitney Quesenbery

Usable content lets users:

[1] Find what they need.

People find what they need when
. links use words they know
. content on information pages is in small pieces with good headings

[2] Understand what they find

People understand information when the content speaks directly to them with
. personal pronouns
. action verbs
. active voice
. words they know

Presenters: Daniel Schwartz, Arin Bhowmick; Oracle

Summary of their experience:

• Specific use case design pattern set = domain abstraction
• Valuable for organizations of any size
• Documentation demands _large_ time commitment!
• Need to create balance, when to reference existing patterns vs. build new
• Critical: properly scope what are pattern vs. product features
• Critical: efficient post-design strategy (just as key as optimal design)
• Design pattern success = documenting best practices for domain + being actually implemented org-wide

Presenters: Laura Mason, Ecora; Gregg Almquist, Experient Interactive and Design

Without Style Guidelines (“The Frankenstein effect”)

. Product was fragmented – page design and language seemed pieced together
. Inconsistency made product harder to use and undermined users’ confidence
. Most important information wasn’t always first on page
. Various synonyms used for the word “enter”
. Tone bounced around from formal legalese to very casual

Presenters: J. Goldberg, Oracle; J. Helfman, Oracle

Recommendations from a usability study of new widescreen page layouts (what users preferred and how they expected such pages to behave):

- Left justify content.
- Make content resize and flow as pages resize.
- Keep page splitters stationary, and let right-side content resize and move in proportion to available page area.
- Have tables always show all columns, unless there's a horizontal scrollbar.
- Make graphs and maps resize with constant aspect ratio, with predefined min/max sizes based on intended tasks.
- Overall: Use a constraint-based liquid layout, rather than redesigning for each display.

Presenters: Timothy Keirnan, Design Critique: Products for People; Sarah Swierenga, Michigan State U., Usability & Accessibility Center

Types of Podcasts

1. Academic: distributes classroom recordings or recordings made outside class from lesson plans.
2. Marketing: corporate services, case studies, methods, testimonials, events.
3. Infotainment: shares user-centered concepts and applications in a fun, non-commercial way.
4. Hobby: promotes anything people like to enjoy outside of work.

Last week I attended the Usability Professionals’ Association (UPA) conference here in Austin; I'll blog soon on the critical sessions I attended.

The conference -- which focuses on real-world practice -- was hugely attended (nearly 800) internationally, with chapter growth exploding in southeast Asia, China, and India.

On March 10, 2007 STC Austin hosted a seminar by STC Associate Fellow Whitney Quesenbery (www.WQusability.com). The seminar, "Using Personas", had us write scenarios, walk through sites using personas, and derive design/documentation ideas. While I was happy to learn about persona usage, I was discouraged by the requirement to amass user research data so that it can be distilled down into useful personas (with what time and resources will this happen?). When she mentioned the shortcut of "surrogates", I immediately connected with the conclusions of a book I just finished: Stumbling on Happiness.

Here's a useful tool for generating not only random names but also complete contact and commerce data, by country (they can do bulk as well):

http://www.fakenamegenerator.com/index.php

Great for demo, sample, and training data. Creates data that passes validation but is still fake: birthday, SSN, credit card, email address, etc.

The STC Austin program on March 1, 2007 hosted Kay Robart and Cynthia Cammack of the Texas Education Agency; they are technical writers sharing their research and experiences with accessibility compliance. Section 508 requires private sites to comply only if they receive federal funds or contract with a federal agency; however, current best practices include this and voluntary guidelines (WCAG), tested against accessibility checkers ("Bobby", AccVerify). Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) are part of the W3C's Web Accessibility Initiative, covering how to make content accessible for disabled users (ex: JAWS) and user devices, such as cell phones.

Yesterday, six of us attended TSAE's class on the association business (trades, societies, foundations, charities, etc.); here are a few thoughts I left with:

Need for more document and content management

In essence, associations combine people and information. Beyond needing content management for their public website articles, associations have growing need for technology to speed up, simplify, distribute, and lower costs for internal as well as member and public documents:
- job postings, resumes, vitae, position descriptions
- bylaws, policies, procedures, compliance materials
- agendas, meeting minutes, action lists
- budgets, reports, status, projections
- proposals, report cards, evaluations
- directories, rosters, working papers
- program descriptions, program materials/distributables, event photos