With only one minor hiccup, our new bathroom is now complete and usable and already stocked with new towels and other such things. It’s not big, or flash but it’s been long overdue and leaves only one more major job to get done before we have the entire house properly modernised.
Month: June 2009
bookmark_borderLanding Pads
I’m guessing that you don’t want to miss that landing pad because if you do you’ll end up ditched in the ocean, floating around aimlessly and with no real idea of what to do next. Can you imagine how horrifying it would be if that happened? Floating there, unable to get back to land and with who knows what swimming around underneath you…
Yet this is the predicament that many users of online help find themselves in, having strayed into the online help they have been cast into an ocean of information with no real idea of how to get back to shore. Ohhh sure, we tell ourselves that the there is an easy way to get to the information they want through our carefully crafted Table of Contents, or perhaps a more direct route can be navigated using that Index you toiled over for hours, or better yet if they use the Search functionality they’ll find what they want. Right?
And, ultimately, yes these mechanisms work. If you know how an Index is structured you can quite quickly navigate to a keyword that probably matches the information you are searching for and should, hopefully, take you almost directly to the very help topic you need. Same goes for the Table of Contents although they are a little more prescriptive and you need to know what you are looking for to be able to find it, and of course the Search will provide you with several help topics that are, probably, what you are looking for.
Meanwhile the sharks have gathered and are nibbling at your feet!
At the UA conference last year, Matthew Ellison gave a presentation on what he termed “Keystone Topics” and in the Summer edition of the ISTC Communicator magazine (again, chock full of good stuff, it’s worth the price of membership alone if you ask me) Paul Filby covers something similar, outlining how to provide “The perfect help-system landing page”.
And so, with all of that in mind that is my task today (yes, a Saturday).
The concept is simple enough. You create a single topic that will be displayed to the user when they bash our old friend the F1 button. That topic is unique to the help system and, based on context, can be used to display a smarter set of links to potentially useful information. If you have the means you could display the most commonly viewed topics or, as I’m doing, you can point to the start of several paths covering the most commonly used areas of the product.
I don’t expect to get ours right the first time round, but hopefully the concept will work. I’m including a small addition to the foot of each such topic, asking users to contact us if they have improvements. It’s only on the landing pages but I’m hoping it might drive a nice little cycle of innovation with direct feedback from the users driving the content of the landing pages in the future.
Hopefully the landing pages will give our users some where dry to stand and survey the land a little, with clear signs to help them get to where they want to go.
bookmark_borderColour and smiles
The sun was shining when I left work, a great brilliant light, dazzling me as we started to commute home. I’d been in a foul mood shortly before but there is something about that light that lifts my spirits no end. Even sitting in the traffic jam in the one way system in Paisley I was still smiling away to myself.
Looking up at the skies, in the direction of home, there was nothing but grey clouds, big deep dark clouds that threatened rain, and the closer we got the darker they grew until the first few big fat spots started to fall. My smile vanished, my mood returned to grey.
It didn’t turn into more than a quick deluge but it was enough to soak the roads and, driving with the sun behind us, brought a wonderful, beautiful effect of nature into play.
Not only was there a bright and vivid rainbow overhead, but from the spray of each car in front of us a tiny fragment of colour flashed and glinted. It was quite mesmerising and beautiful.
At one point it even looked like the car in front of us had driven THROUGH the end of the rainbow, such was the brilliance of the colours. The smile was soon back on my face as I tried my best to capture this wonderful moment so I could repeat it later, but sometimes words just aren’t enough, nor are photos (Louise did try with her mobile phone though).
It’s a shame, I’d loved to have shared it with you.
So, with a spring in my step I fair bounded through the front door to find that our new bathroom has progressed well. Tiles on the walls, shower installed, units built and installed, new radiator in place and the new counter top basin in place, with the taps installed on the right of the sink.
Arse.
We asked for the taps to go on the left.
Fucksticks.
The countertop was the last one in stock, the nearest other place that does them is in Edinburgh, but hey, that’s not my problem but will, no doubt, delay the job. The bathroom certainly won’t be finished tomorrow, and even Saturday might be pushing it.
Wankfucks.
Still, that rainbow was really something.
bookmark_borderDust covered
Home last night to view the latest bathroom work and we now have gyproc’d walls, floorboards and a bath. A great big, deep, long, WHITE, bath with centre mounted taps.
We also have a very dusty cat.
Whilst part of me knows that cliches are such because they are, usually, true, there is no doubting the fact that curiosity is very much in the nature of a cat. I think he’s explored every single inch of the stripped out bathroom that he can reach, including clambering up onto the windowsill to stick his head up the gap where the pipe work disappears into the loft and if he’d been able to I’ve no doubt he’d have clambered up in there.
He’s obviously a little stressed too with men in the house all day, thumping and crashing about, not to mention all the new smells and that big climbing frame that is currently in the hall (the stack of boxes containing tiles, sinks and other bathroom parts).
Oll-E does two things when he’s a bit stressed, he sleeps a lot and becomes a right wee sook *.
Whilst most nights he’ll sleep, well anywhere he wants really, including the occasionally venture onto the foot of the bed, last night found me lying on my side with a small black furry creature, purring loudly enough to wake the dead (but not Louise) curled up in the gap between my stomach and the edge of the bed.
Which is very cute but makes rolling over a tad tricky!
bookmark_borderHelter Skelter
When I get to the bottom
I go back to the top of the slide
Where I stop and turn
and I go for a ride
Till I get to the bottom and I see you again!!!!
Ever get that feeling that you’ve been here before?
I write this blog post with haste as I’m halfway through the penultimate week of a particularly arduous project. Not only are we releasing a new version of the product, but we are completing the first major stage of our move to Author-it.
Overall the migration has been pretty painless. There are still some Word templates issues to work around and getting to grips with Variants has still to be tackled, but overall we are pretty happy with our choice. The only major gripe we have is partly our (ok, MY) own fault, and it’s here that I’ll offer the most valuable tip I can.
If you are migrating legacy content to Author-it (we were moving from Structured FrameMaker), make sure you thoroughly test and check the import settings. Time constraints had me rush this stage and we ended up paying for it, spending far too long cleaning up rogue topics than we had planned. Every cloud has a silver lining though, and it does mean that the documentation is now far more consistently written and styled than it had been. However, going through some 5000 odd topics by hand wasn’t the greatest use of our time!
Soon we will be looking to how we can leverage the output to provide better access to information, feeding into the developer community website we have already built, and improving how we deliver information alongwith our product set.
For the former we have taken some inspiration from the presentation by Rachel Potts and Brian Harris (Red Gate Software) at last years UA Conference, titled Delivering Help in a Support Portal. For our implementation the Publications team will take the lead, and it’ll be interesting to see where it takes us. Web 2.0, anyone?
We will also be looking to provide better online help by introducing Keystone Topics, as suggested by Matthew Ellison. Author-it should make these topics, which are the first topics the user lands on when they start the online help and which provide sensible links to common information (rather than just providing repurposed user manuals), very easy to build.
Two of the team will be in Cardiff for the conference this year so it’ll be interesting to see what we learn there and how we can really start to leverage Author-it in more and more powerful ways. I’m definitely keen to start innovating what we do and, in a few weeks time, we won’t have any further barriers to stop us.
bookmark_borderNew music exclusive!
Well, exclusive to my inbox at least, hey don’t look a gift horse and all that, right? I’m not troubled bloody diva, published everywhere and rubbing shoulders with the stars or anything, I takes what I gets!
So it was a very nice surprise to be able to receive an email in my inbox offering me a preview release of an upcoming EP featuring a band whose:
sound has grown stronger and surer as a result of their creative self-empowerment – alive with animalistic rage, suffused with emotive human spirit. Quite simply, it is enormous
Which sounds quite bloody impressive if you ask me.
The band in question are called Lupen Crook & The Murderbirds, and this is their first self-published work and also marks the first time I’ve heard anything by them. I’ve listened to the EP a couple of times now and I’ll happily admit that it’s good if not quite as startlingly original as the press release makes out but hey, when did a press release ever resemble reality?
Folk-Punk is the genre, apparently (yeah, new one on me too) and at first listen it sounds fairly derivative, some punk-lite melodies and an ‘authentic’ voice. Nothing out of the ordinary. A second, closer, listen reveals more depth and a nice grasp of rhythm and lyric, and I have to admit that it is growing on me. A third and fourth listen immediately followed and already the songs feel comfortable, like older friends. There is a definite quality to the tracks which hints at grander things to come.
The band are ploughing their own path and seem to embracing all forms of media in their quest for artistic expression. Whether or not that will stand them in good stead only time will tell but, based on the music, there is no reason why they can’t push on to bigger and brighter things. Whether they want to do that or not remains to be seen.
Either way, this is definitely a band to watch.
The EP is out on 4th July, more details available on the band website: www.lupencrookandthemurderbirds.co.uk.