ASTD Austin July 21, 2006
Program: High-Tech Training for Low-Tech People
Presenter: Katrina Schold, Manager of Client Education & Support at Convio (previously at Dell, Tivoli/IBM, Hire.com, and Best Software)
Topic: How to adjust training to transfer appropriate technological information to a non-technical audience: tips for reading and managing a diverse audience, responding to signals, and explaining technology despite a student's inexperience or misgivings.
I posted earlier about the new AirDesk for Workstations (versus laptops, which they did first and I already use); I'm following up with a few shots of how my home-based office is developing. So far, it's just what I hoped for. It's also working out quite well that I sit facing a bank of windows, so that no glare hits my screen but my fevered brain gets natural light. Here are some photos of how I have it configured:
Paper: “Escaping the design traps of creeping featurism: Introducing a fitness management strategy”
Authors: Dong-Seok Lee et al., Cognitive Systems Engineering Lab, Ohio State U.
[MC: I've summarized here some useful bits of a longer peer-reviewed paper included in the UPA conference.]
Session: “The Usability of AJAX: A Primer for Usability Professionals and First Hand Account”
Presenter: John Whalen, Ph.D., Human Factors International
AJAX = A (Asynchronous) + JA (JavaScript) + X (XMLHttpRequest)
Session: “Tales Come True: Use Cases As Functional Specifications”
Presenter: Merryl Gross GE Healthcare
Summary: Functional Specifications may be the most important artifacts in software development (blueprints for what the team is creating), yet they are often hard to maintain and use. Instead, Use Cases, created as a set of wiki pages, can be expanded with UI design descriptions to completely take the place of specifications for a web application. The development team finds use cases much easier to create and maintain, easier to use for test and documentation, and equal to functional specs as a blueprint for creating software.
Session: "Interaction Designers and Agile Development: A Partnership"
Presenter: Lynn Miller, Manager of User Experience Team, Alias (acquired by AutoDesk)
Wikipedia: Agile software development customers: "Customers are the people who define the product. They may be product managers, business analysts, or actual customers."
Session: "Enhancing Usability of Print- and Web-Based Documents through Information Design"
Presenters: Barbra Enlow, Susan Kleimann, and Qiwu Liu of Kleimann Communication Group
Top Three Factors in Document Usability
Last week I attended the Usability Professionals’ Association (UPA) conference in Colorado; I would have blogged then, but half the laptop keyboard went flakey (wrong characters)! So, I'll blog soon on the critical sessions I attended (AJAX usability, wiki-based use cases / func specs, remote usability on the cheap).
The conference -- which focuses far more on practice than theory -- was hugely attended (over 200 more than they expected: 600+) representing 18 countries, with rapid chapter growth in China and India. Good news! The 2007 Conference is here in Austin, June 11-15.
Just wrote this up for a presentation proposal for the Austin ASTD conference, so I thought I'd share it for the record:
For a decade now, our small Information Development group has worked toward the goal of single-sourcing content between user guides and technical training materials. Without content reuse, we found that huge disparities developed between these outputs: procedures would be updated and expanded for training that would never make it back to the documentation, and information would actually conflict, leaving the student to sort it out. Separate doc/training source generated double the work and a maintenance nightmare, and we were charged to solve it – affordably.
Bringing home a desktop computer for working remotely doesn't require a desk, as long as you have an LCD monitor:
http://www.airdesks.com/computer_desk.asp
I bought the basic air desk for my laptop a few years ago and moved my "office" to the living room -- fabulous convenience and comfort, and I'll never go back!
