bookmark_borderRecently Read

Another grab bag of, hopefully, interesting posts, it’s a varied bunch this week which fits with my current mindset which is grabbing at a large variety of different topics and trying to make sense of them all (and I think it’s finally beginning to come together). Enough of that, on with the links!

Do you write FAQs? How about NAQs?
As Kevin Kelly points out, we’ve all read FAQs which aren’t, instead they are NAQs – Never Asked Questions, “Easily answered questions that no one has ever asked.” He then goes on to make an excellent point, namely that:

…if you don’t answer the FAQs, the internet tubes will. That’s what forums are. Customers, both potential and present, bring their real questions to find real answers. Here people who don’t work for the company will supply answers. Often these answers are good, but often the organization could supply a better answer, if it were really running a FAQ. Why not make it easy for everyone to find the best answer — from the organization’s point of view?

A Quarky new approach?
I mentioned Quark’s new Dynamic Publishing product when it was announced, and after initially being a little excited (“dynamic!” “publishing!”) I became a little confused by what it was actually going to offer.
Sarah at the Palimpset blog took an in-depth look and found that it was really just a form of single source, and suggests that:

if the “dynamic publishing” bit in the name is a preview of coming attractions rather than an accurate label for what they have now, then perhaps there’s hope. But I’m glad I’m not the one trying to pull this off because from out here, it looks like an extreme long shot.

The post is an excellent investigation of what drove Quark down this route.

Information Design Patterns
WARNING: Site requires Flash and is heavy on bandwidth.
If you ever have to create an infographic (a graph or other type of formal diagram) then have a look at this website for some inspiration and ideas for the future, as well as some in-depth analysis of the form factors presented.

Top 8 mistakes in usability
Given that we have recently revisited the idea of using personas and have spent some time trying to guess what they should be point 2 hit home. I know, I know, nothing replaces research based on REAL users.

Let’s pretend our user’s name is Jane. Let’s pretend she is 38 years old, drives a purple Prius, reads mystery novels, loves bulldogs, and likes to go sailing. Let’s pretend she comes to our website and likes feature A but not feature B. Therefore, we should develop more things like feature A. See? We’re very customer-centered.

This is the fun of creating a persona, which allows teams to make decisions based on fictional people, rather than doing the hard work of listening to real customers.

We actually decided to focus more on user roles first, before broaching the subject of Personas, and I’ll be doing my damnedst to make sure we don’t run into these mistakes.

Trends, tools, technologies in online documentation
Sarah Maddox wrote up some great notes from the recent Australasian Online Documentation and Content Conference, including these from the session by Joe Welinske which was based on the results of the WritersUA Skills and Technologies Survey. Some interesting observations on Vista, trends in our profession and some things that we should all have on our radar, including:

Structured authoring — affects a growing number of technical writers. Joe sees this as the most important concept for us to learn about. It affects our roles and production process. The author works in a form-based environment, putting the content into pre-determined pigeonholes. Presentation is separate and automated.

I quite like the fact that this isn’t stated as single source which has other connotations. Perhaps more of us are closer to structured authoring than we think? I mean, we all use templates and predefined formats, don’t we?

That’s it for now, time to get ready for the bank holiday weekend here!

bookmark_borderRandom notes of no importance

Faster Pussycat! Kill! Kill!
Is it wrong that I’d really rather Ollie killed the mice rather than bring them into the house to play? It’s one thing picking up a dead mouse, quite another to spend 20 minutes chasing a live one round the living room at 3 am.

Melody Gardot & R.E.M.
After catching her appearance on Jools Holland (and as a side pondering, does anyone refer to it as “Later… with Jools Holland”? No, it’s just “Jools Holland” innit) I listened to some samples from her album and promptly purchased it.

Listening to it I can picture her onstage persona, sultry jazz singer, and I wonder if that impacts how I engage with her music?

It was the same after I saw R.E.M. a couple of years ago, their last couple of albums had largely escaped my notice (to the point that, for example, I’m still not entirely sure on which album the track “Lotus” can be found), and I was a bit non-plussed… until I heard the tracks live.

Yet after the gig, re-listening to those same tracks now is a different experience.

Yeah I know, nothing startling but it’s been on my mind.

That and the fact that R.E.M.’s new album, Accelerate is rather stonkingly good.

Power out
All of a sudden the screen went blank, the music fell silent, and the power LEDs faded. We’d had a powercut.

“Bugger” he exclaimed in annoyance.

Actually he said “ohh fucksticks” because he was rather cheesed off having spent 30 minutes carefully crafting a newsletter entry. Then hope made an appearance for he had used Google Docs and Google Docs autosaves every now and then and maybe, just maybe, he hadn’t just lost all of his work.

And then the glimmer of hope widened, the websites he’d been using for research were opened in Firefox tabs, perhaps it will have saved them as well.

Lo and behold it was true. Google Docs HAD saved all of his changes, Firefox DID remember which tabs he had open.

Ahh the joy of the righteous, I KNEW I used web apps for a reason.

Mind you, it still amazes me that GOOGLE Docs don’t allow you to send the documents by email… I’m sure they have an email client as well… right?

Financial Ponderingmentness
Between oil prices rising, and the credit crunch … er… crunching, I’ve been taking stock of our financial situation. It’s not that bad, although the looming remortgage will impact it in one way or another.

I’m tempted to go through the remortgage process myself, following the Moneysavingexpert’s guide of course, but wondered if anyone else had done the same?

bookmark_borderGood Customer Service

Regular readers will be aware that we’ve recently had a new kitchen installed, and that we had some delays in that process. We sent off a letter of complaint asking for compensation for having spent over 4 weeks without a kitchen (the room was completely bare, back to floorboards and brick).

Last night we received a response.

Continue reading “Good Customer Service”

bookmark_borderA pint a day…

…is good for you, but only if it’s Guinness.

As a seasoned Guinness drinker this news finally backs up my own, far less scientific, research. From now on, whilst knocking back my umpteenth pint of smooth, dark, velvety goodness, I’ll be ignore all counter-claims that fly in the face of this research.

Guinness is good for you, that’s all I wanna hear!

And for those of you that will, no doubt, suggest that all research is flawed I have only one thing to say to you.

*sticks fingers in ears*

I CAN’T HEAR YOU!

bookmark_borderOnly the good die young

One of the reasons DITA has gained so much traction in such a short space of time is that the people behind it are taking advantage of the internet to publicise and drive it forward. With that in mind it’s great to see them open the new DITA Maturity Model out to the community:

This community is designed to bring the DITA Maturity Model to life, applying the “Wisdom of the Crowds” to the evolution and refinement of this approach to DITA adoption. The premise is that none of us is as good as all of us. The DITA MMC is an evolving resource that will grow and change over time with your active participation and contributions.

Definitely a good usage of the social media tools available at the moment.

One thing that struck me, taken from the Content Wrangler coverage, is a simple reason as to why more people are considering a move towards DITA-based content:

Enterprises looking to fast track their content strategy and minimize the risks of a big-bang initiative are choosing DITA–one of the most popular information models to suit today’s content–rich, multi-channel environment.

For some reason I hadn’t quite figured that out, but if you are putting together a business case built around DITA then it’s worth investigating this in more depth. That said, this is definitely one of those “so obvious I hadn’t considered it” moments!

The maturity model also highlights one of the reasons that DITA is proving popular even if it isn’t the best standard to be using for every circumstance. Quite simply, it’s because it’s young, new and (this is the important bit) is being developed in plain view of everyone on the internet. Admittedly I’ve not gone looking for DocBook or SD1000 resources but as they are already fairly mature they seem to be struggling to keep up with the pace of development around DITA. If DITA is the cool kid on the block, DocBook is definitely the wise old sage, stooped on the corner.

Social media on the internet thrives on participation and with DITA still growing up everyone has a chance to get involved and influence things, and that helps generate buy-in, which drives more improvements, which increases community buy-in… and so on.

So, even if you aren’t interested in DITA but are interested in how social media (online communities, web 2.0, whatever you want to call it) might help you and your company, it might be worth while checking out the maturity model and see if the same … erm… model.. can be applied to what you do.

bookmark_borderDo children still play in the street?

Excuse this burst of nostalgia, but whilst tidying up this weekend I happened across some old school diaries and various notes and letters to my Mum, scrawled in my own fine hand aged between 7 and 10 or 11 (roughly). One thing that struck me was just how much I used to do when I was younger. Excluding the piano lessons and practice, the Boys Brigade and visits to see my Gran I used do a lot.

Memories came flooding back, times of mammoth Monopoly games that would span weeks at a time, bombing round the street on my bike, playing tag with a spud gun, and that one where you tied some poor sod to a lamppost and everyone ran off to hide. Tennis in the street when Wimbledon was on, cricket on the big patch of grass round the back when the Tests were on, and football at every other turn because, after Action Man, that’s what boys did back then.

I had a pretty damn good childhood, until my sister came along to spoilt it (KIDDING!! Or am I?), and I realise this may just be down to the fact that I’m getting older but kids don’t seem to do as much these days? Don’t get me wrong it’s not that I don’t see kids outside playing, it’s just that I don’t see as many as I (think I) could.

Of course I can’t really comment on this, not being a parent.

Still it was nice to flick through the old notes and diaries of my childhood. Remembering the red trainers, visiting my Mum in hospital, and even the time I had to put cream on my “wili” (see, even back then I was a blogger in the making, no holds barred!!), There were even some slightly more up-to-date photos, including one of my sister and Louise, hey it might even make for a good caption competition.

Right, enough of that, I’d better say goodbye because she’ll kill me when she sees I’ve posted that photo!! Was nice knowing you all!