Gryphon Mountain is the online home of Ben Minson—technical communicator, writer, and cartoonist. This blog discusses tech comm and other writing topics. More »
Kevin Cuddihy has posted my guest post on STC’s Notebook in advance of Wednesday’s Web seminar on quick reference guides.
As of this morning, 58 people are signed up, which is exciting and a bit intimidating at the same time.
If you’re interested, you can get more information and sign up on STC’s seminars page.
I recently held some informal usability testing for some changes to an online help system I was considering. Because I hadn’t done any testing on the original help, I incorporated some of that as well. Doing so pretty much confirmed that I was on the right track with the changes I wanted to make. The help as it stood wasn’t very usable.
All documentation can stand some usability testing. We technical communicators like to claim that we’re user focused and user advocates. I like to believe that myself. However, sometimes we can be more like developers than we want to admit. We do things our way, the way we think is best. We may have even proved in the past that what we’re doing is pretty user-friendly. But times—and users—change.
I’m presenting a webinar for STC on Wednesday, February 10. The event will be a reprisal of the presentation on quick reference guides that Tom Johnson and I gave at the 2009 STC Summit, though with some updates to the content.
Description: Quick reference guides provide a friendly way for users to learn new products without burying themselves in a manual or online help system. This seminar will help participants understand the benefits of using quick reference guides as a primary method of documentation. At the end of the session you will leave with tips and suggestions for developing organization, content, and layout for quick reference material.
To register, go to STC’s Web seminars page. The cost is $79 for STC members and $149 for others.
Over the weekend, I posted my thoughts on the STC dues increase that was announced in October.
On a related note, Tom Johnson posted the results to date of a brief survey we’ve done with the chapter. If our chapter is a microcosm as Tom wonders in this post, then more challenges await STC in 2010.
Recently Michael Hughes, First Vice President of STC (meaning Guy in Line for President Next Year) wrote a post about what it’s like leading STC during this difficult time.
Michael says:
We tend to keep a core of loyal members (I love all of you), but that has created a demographic problem: A lot of us are older and will be retiring in the coming decade. We are losing our “next generation” of STC members. The upshot is that decisions about how to grow the society are being made by those who often lack the perspective of what the target population wants. Ouch!! OK, that one hits this sixty-year old boy too, so hold off on the flames.
I consider myself among the “next generation” that Michael talks about. Depending on whom you ask, I was born during the somewhat fuzzy transition from Generation X to Generation Y. I graduated from college about four years ago and have a grand total of five years’ experience or so in technical communication. If I’ve ever come across here as anything different (the most likely being even more ignorant than I really am), then you have my apologies for deceiving you.
I agree that the best people to know how to reach the (shall we say) newer generations of technical communicators are themselves. But is replacing the current leadership with a bunch of twenty-thirty-something, forward-thinking, tech-savvy hotshots the answer?
Much has been said about the problem the Society for Technical Communication has found itself in, including on blogs, Twitter, and email listservs. (If you’d like to see some posts about it, Sarah O’Keefe has provided a list.) I’ve deliberately kept quiet here until I had some semblance of perspective to offer.
But I’ve come to the conclusion that maybe this is a crisis STC needed—an impetus to get us all thinking together about how to improve the model, how to offer more direct benefits to the members.
We’re past the point where talking about what previous officers did is going to help. I bought a house about two years ago and still am not happy with some of the ways the previous owners did things or left things for us, but my wife has pointed out that it’s our house, so we need to deal with it. Yes, previous staff and officers at the main office made detrimental decisions, but going over that can do only one positive thing: to show us how not to do it. Once that lesson is learned, it’s time to move on.
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