Last night I attended the STC Austin program "Four Candles - Just What is Simplified Technical English?", presented by Alan Porter of Quadralay and the 4J's Group. (Do watch the Four Candles video if you don't know this famous skit!)

Simplified Technical English is a writing standard created for aerospace/defense maintenance documentation, born of a deadly need for clarity (such as the worker who obediently "cut the power" with loppers and died). It's a controlled language because it restricts grammar, style, and vocabulary. Its goal is to stamp out ambiguity (one word = one meaning) and present technical complexity in the easiest language possible, to support users of diverse ages, abilities, and familiarity with English. If this sounds like the Plain Language movement to you, you're right: there's significant overlap. Boiling it down, Simplified Technical English has two parts:

Last night, Dr. Clay Spinuzzi, Director of UT's Computer Writing and Research Lab, entertained STC Austin with tales of the journey by which they brought CWRL's website out of the 20th century. The site, a knowledge repository holding decades worth of white papers and instructional content, was bottlenecked, unmaintainable, and inaccessible. What to do?

O'Reilly has a new book series, "Short Cuts", that is ONLY being sold in electronic form: "Whether it's a first look at a brand new technology, a quick reference, or a thorough explanation of a narrow but crucial subject, Short Cuts bring you focused information in an easy-to-use, portable package." Interestingly, this is the same strategy we applied to handling publications on the iMIS Helpsite (docs.imis.com): the User Guides are available as bound publications as before, but the narrow, topic-specific References are posted for download only, for online use, portability, and personal printing. Where we differ is that ours are free distributions, and we post in an editable format, to support site-specific modification.

By revisiting the work of Kathy Sierra, of Creating Passionate Users fame, I followed the breadcrumb trail to the new O'Reilly book series she helped to shape: Head First. The Head First Labs blog reveals some of the research and approach employed in these "brain-friendly guides"; I'll try to summarize their strategy as it's presented in the book I purchased, Head First HTML with CSS & XHTML.

This past week, I have caught up on a lot of traffic about a new book called Forces for Good: The Six Practices of High-Impact Nonprofits and a supporting article both by Heather McLeod Grant & Leslie R. Crutchfield. I am also working on looking at how we organize and structure iMIS moving forward for the UX Team. The article refocused some of my thoughts.

There has been a trend in the non-profit world to adopt more for-profit business practices to succeed. I have seen, as an example, more people with advanced degrees and experience in the for-profit world recruited into customer organizations. I have often wondered about the overall impact of this direction, whether over the long-term it would bear greater results or just somehow make it more mechanical, lose a little bit of the magic. I am an idealist and I want to be believe that through my work at ASI, I am affecting social change and having an impact on the greater good, regardless of how small or indirect. It’s one of the main reasons I work here. I guess, like most relationships, there are benefits to both the non-profit and for-profit sectors from these trends.

For those of you who enjoyed the web 2.0 - The Machine is using Us video posted on YouTube by Mike Wesch, a Kansas State Professor. He has added another video on information categorization - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-4CV05HyAbM. At the same time he posted another video called A Vision of Students Today - which is an interesting look into Gen Y - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dGCJ46vyR9o. E

Designing for iMIS isn’t always easy; our already large and still growing user base means we have a lot of people to please. Currently, we base our design and feature development decisions on feedback we receive from SMRs, RSEs and information that gets filtered back from customer engagements. While all this information is important, it is still hard when you think about our large user base not to get carried away thinking about a million different user scenarios and the requirements to meet them all. But meeting every user’s goal can lead to a product that while rich in features doesn’t really meet any one user’s needs. Our goal is not to design every iteration and function of iMIS; our goal is to focus on meeting the core business needs of our customers. While trying to meet the needs of all our users we don’t want to lose sight of our goal, so we have developed some new tools to help focus our design efforts.

Presenters: Ted Sienknecht, Marcia Kerchner

Concept: We're overlooking a wealth of usability-related data we have on hand!

Where to gather information?

. Lessons learned: Study system usage statistics and user feedback from current/prior releases for possible improvements and functionality
. Software evaluations: Study other software users currently use for implementations they expect or understand
. Field observations: Watch users while they perform relevant tasks and note process, actions, systems, problems, needs, etc.
. Interviews & Focus groups: Use structured inquiry with users about their opinions and experiences
. Task analysis: Investigate typical tasks users perform on the system
. User profiles: Create representative identities for user subgroups (personas)
. Help desk logs: Read help requests for areas for improvement or new functionality

From: Jim Sneeringer [Jim@Sneeringer.com]
Sent: Tuesday, June 12, 2007 8:47 PM
To: UserExperience
Subject: UPA Conference Report to Date

Tutorial on Pattern Libraries

a. The main think I learned here is that Sara did a great job of setting up or template.

Attached is the workbook from "Creating a Custom UI Pattern Library"

From: Dean Barker [mailto:dean.barker@humanfactors.com]
Sent: Friday, June 22, 2007 12:49 PM
To: dean.barker@humanfactors.com; aadomenas@alta.com; ken.becker@intermec.com; denise.belling@gmail.com; mcamp@njm.com; elena.cistrunk@aristocrat-inc.com; erik.egbertson@autodesk.com; tony.fagerlund@swedbank.se; david.fine@bowne.com; anestes-fotiades@idexx.com; ngift@mit.edu; cgoings@google.com; ryangossen@yahoo.com; marlah@well.com; robin.k.hanks.ay3v@statefarm.com; whharrison4@yahoo.com; naomih@hiser.com.au; jjanis@progressive.com; kek@dk.ibm.com; lidlbare@yahoo.com; kleppner_andrew@emc.com; f3484134@yahoo.com; kmarshak@earthlink.net; susan.michael@thomas.com; linda_parra@tds.net; peter@half-tide.com; michael.rawlins@opensolutions.com; csossrickes@yahoo.com; jinwise@gmail.com; jill.shinkawa@hp.com; shilpa.shukla@hp.com; allison.smith@thomson.com; jim@sneeringer.com; erik.snell@autodesk.com; mike@lifename.com; darrell.h.taylor@ssa.gov; judi.m.victor@boeing.com; thomas.vollaro@autodesk.com; vutpakdi@acm.org; heather.walker@thomson.com; nancy.wojack@intermec.com