Category: Work

It’s official. I’m now the webmaster for the ISTC.

Before I start talking about my plans and ideas for the ISTC website, I thought I’d give you all a bit of background as to why I’m reasonably well qualified to be taking this on.

It all starts about 16 years ago…

I joined a small software company in the West of Scotland as a “Technical Administrator” and, as well as writing some user documentation, I was sent on a course to learn HTML and then charged with creating the company website, the first version of which is still available via the Internet Archive (search for ‘crossaig.co.uk’) and was launched in September 1996. Since then, I’ve created websites for charity organisations, personal projects, and several small businesses and individuals under the moniker of One Man Designs.

Throughout my profession the internet has been there, and it’s been a large part of my personal life as well. I ran a successful blog directory for a while (Scottish Blogs) and took great pleasure in organising several “meetups” of some of the members. I’ve meet some amazing people, who I now call my friends, via the internet and it continues to delight and amaze me at how well it functions to connect people, from all over the world, who have similar needs and interests.

So what does that mean for the ISTC?

Without going into great detail here (just yet), the main focus for me over the next couple of months will be to restructure the content based on feedback from last year’s Marketing Frenzy, move the current website over to a content management system, and tweak the design to allow a bit more flexibility to handle some of the new features.

I’m keen to bring some more activity to the website, and introduce some “social features” on the way. It will mean changing some things but just as the technical communications industry is learning how to deal with social media, so does the ISTC website.

Whilst compiling my column for the ISTC newsletter this month (I offer a round up of the ‘best’ blog posts from the past month, hugely subjective I know) I was worried I’d skewed the resulting list of blog posts somewhat.

You see the team I’m part of are about to embark on a couple of brainstorming workshops to try and better improve the quality of our work and, lo and behold, it seems that there have been a few blog posts last month that feature, or discuss, how to be better, how to improve quality.

I scanned back through my Instapaper account (an excellent bookmarking/article reading facility) but it was true, it seemed that other people were thinking similar things at a similar time.

Coincidence? Perhaps, but this kind of thing seems to happen too often to be just that. I wonder if there is some sort of cycle involved here, and that the people who share their ideas on blogs are falling into a similar pattern.

Or perhaps that pattern already existed but it’s only becoming evident now as more and more people discuss and share ideas online?

Regardless, that sharing of ideas is hugely beneficial and reminds me that I really should do more of that here. Whilst no two situations, companies, or teams are the same, there is always a common level of information and experience from which we can all learn.

Whether it’s back to basics reminders, or more in-depth analysis of a specific issue, being able to tap into the collective mind of so many talented, intelligent and helpful people is something that is worth remembering.

We are all awesome.

The next ISTC technical communicators’ meeting in Glasgow will take place on Monday 21st February 2011, from 7.30 pm onwards. Come along to talk about latest news and trends in communication, or just to meet other communication professionals.

The event is free and open to anyone interested in technical communication, such as technical authors, information architects, internal communication professionals, report writers, marketing writers, web content writers and graphic designers.

Venue: Waxy O’Connors pub, 44 West George Street, Glasgow, G2 1DH. Please make your way to McTurk’s Room on the middle level.

Please forward this message on to your colleagues or anyone else who may be interested. For more information, contact westscotland_areagroup@istc.org.uk or visit http://istcwestofscotland.eventbrite.com/

Random thought: Has the rise of (talk of) emotional content (affective assistance) been driven by the concentration, over the last few years, on technological solutions?

Single sourcing, XML, DITA, DocBook, and all the rest have (rightly) taken our profession forward, so I guess it’s natural that the general trends, as well as refocussing on the content itself, are looking for how to better engage with a modern audience.

The evidence suggests that that modern audience is Facebooking, Twittering, and blogging, and wants content in easily digestable chunks.

That plays nicely into the hands of single sourcing (chunks) and the idea of emotional content through connecting to the user, using friendly language to make the content easily digestable.

So, if you’ve already got your technology sorted out, why aren’t you looking at how your content is presented?

I’m currently in the midst of some thinking. I’m thinking about how we can improve what we do, how we measure those improvements and ultimately how we make a step change in the quality of our output.

Oh no, I used that word, didn’t I.

Quality.

At this point I will veer away from that word, for fear of plunging headlong into the land of metrics, and instead outline some of the things floating around in my head.

To improve the perceived quality of the information, there are some things we can do:

• Improve the navigation
• Improve the findability of the information
• Improve the technical accuracy of the information
• Improve the completeness of the information

Navigation and findability are linked and we have some ideas on how to tackle those through better indexing, better understanding of the structures, addition of signposts and all those good things.

Improving the completeness and technical accuracy can be a little trickier to nail down though. No product documentation is ever complete but by improving our approach to collating information and the questions we ask, we can take start to make improvements, those same questions should also help improve the technical accuracy, as will a beefed up review process.

With all of this in mind, we will be running some workshops early February to revisit the basics. We will cover off every aspect of how we work, and step through how we can improve the outputs of all our hard work (well, all the hard work the team do, I mostly try and keep out of the road thesedays, they seem to work better that way!).

I’ve been with my current company for four years and, for each of those years the team have managed to make significant improvements in a variety of areas. Year One, the first members were hired and we set about improving the quality of the content, Year Two we launched our developer website as a means to make it easier to access the content we were creating (that website is about to relaunch in it’s third iteration), Year Three we transitioned from FrameMaker to Author-it and publish our Knowledge Centre to the developer website, and this coming year… well, time will tell.

I’ve no idea what we will decide to do, what processes we will change or adopt, what new ideas and challenges we will set ourselves, but this part of the job is the one I enjoy the most. Everything is fresh, new and exciting.

Roll on 2011!

2011 looms larger and larger in my view and as we start to plan out our goals and aims for the coming year, so I find myself increasingly struggle to make time to write some blog posts, add to that a couple of weeks of food poisoning, and I’m a little behind with things.

That said, it is looking like we are well placed to enter the new year with all the foundations in place to make measureable improvements to the information we offer. We have routes into customer projects via support call outcome codes (if it was an information related issue, I’m contacting the project to see how it arose and what we can do to fix it), stats on what areas of our knowledge centre are being accessed down to the topic level, via our recent upgrade of Author-it, which will allow us to target the areas of the documentation that are being most heavily used, and we will soon be launching a Q&A style forum within our developer community website, allowing a level of user-generated content to be available to all of our customers.

Personally I’ve started to get to grips with the ISTC website and hope to use some of the time available over the holidays to crack on with moving it to a CMS. There is some restructuring required as well and I’m hoping to start adding some new sections in the early part of the year, more on that nearer the time!

To everyone who has visited this blog, I wish you all the very best for the coming festive period, and in to the coming year!