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:
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
The STC Austin program on February 1, 2007 hosted Dan Beall, the Product Manager for Doc-To-Help at ComponentOne (a visual tools producer with close ties to Microsoft). Although his talk focused on the new release of D2H and its facility for importing RoboHelp projects, his coverage of the history of Windows Help and the authoring issues surrounding it was compelling. That the era of Windows Help domination was ending was an inescapeable conclusion...
Links from a friend in the biz: "How to Design a Good API & Why It Matters", presentation by Joshua Block, Principal Engineer at Google, and designer of numerous Java platform features.
video: http://www.infoq.com/presentations/effective-api-design
slides w/o video: http://lcsd05.cs.tamu.edu/slides/keynote.pdf
Had to share this! Recorded from the TED conference, here's a fascinating look at how emerging technologies could profoundly transform how we use computers:
http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=884017118027634444&q=jeff+han&hl=en
Not summarizing the class contents, but just recording some thoughts. My disappointment is not with the instructor, who has great knowledge and interest and integrity -- a career focused on transforming software development art into repeatable craft; rather, I felt let down (as I so often am with methodologies) by the fundamental impracticality or impossibility of the methods being taught.
His premise was all about the primacy of requirements, that deeply comprehensive and accurate requirements make true engineering possible. I believe that. Yet human language-based requirements are wildly difficult to disambiguate, even with exhaustive effort; therefore, he proposes use case development and many other mapping activities to flesh out these details until validity/verifiability is fully realized.
