Reading time: < 1 min Why would you choose to make something difficult to use? Are you deliberately putting barriers in the road? Or are you just forgetting the main reason why people pick up a document or manual? Long ago, when I had just started out as a technical writer, I attended a course on designing for Print. It…
Reading time: < 1 min How many times in your professional career have you been asked to spell something, or asked if a word is hyphenated? How many times are you asked whether to use “that” or “which” in a sentence? We are the grammar police, the word monkeys, and many of us revel in that role (if not the…
Reading time: 2 mins Last week I spent most of my time facilitate our retrospectives, that is I spent a lot of time chairing meetings, encouraging and monitoring debate, and far too much time manipulating Post-It notes. Let me explain. Within the development group, we base our working practices on Agile development and part of that suggests that at…
Reading time: 2 mins I’m getting royally fedup with a lot of what I read that is written in the name of usability. Maybe it’s just a personal loathing of the overly academic, or perhaps I lean towards simplicity a little too heavily but SHEESH, some of the better known experts can’t half prattle on… I’m a member of…
Reading time: 3 mins The gaps in your documentation aren’t there because you haven’t consider a particular level of user; the gaps in your documentation are there because you haven’t considered how one level of user becomes another. How DO you get from Beginner to Expert? The question above was prompted by a presentation I attend last week, given…
Reading time: < 1 min Windows XP has a bug in it, one that has bugged me for ages but is under the “can be tolerated” category. I’ve looked for a fix before but couldn’t find anything, mainly because it’s hard to describe within search terms (note to Google: how about searches based on uploaded screenshots??). The problem occurs when…