AODC 2006 - A Delegate's Perspective
By Janet Taylor
Four days of learning about the latest online writing techniques might not be
everyone's cup of tea, but for the 60 or so attendees, it was magic!
Choco
Most of the presenters were as you would expect, but one presenter, a
technical writer from the Federal Police, 'Choco' Munday, certainly woke us up.
Sadly, I would never be able to imitate his fierce delivery, but I'm sure no one
in the police department would dare to use the words he considers as UNWORDS.
Following is a small sample of his unwords, and, surprisingly, he didn't include
any of mine:
- Actioned, helpware, reoccur, autoised, custodied, agreeance, impactful,
rebranding, irregardless, earwitness, tabify, untabify, orientate, doneness.
Choco also gave us some concise ways to describe how to use some words, such
as percent and percentage. That is:
- Percent is used with numbers, for example, "14 percent of the
population" and percentage is used when there is no number, such as "a large
percentage of the population". My user's style guide now has some new
examples also, for using words such as 'into' and 'in to' and 'effect' and
'affect'.
Choco opposed the view that the US is taking over our language by pointing
out the large number of Australian words now in general use. Words and phrases
such as "No sweat", "Hills Hoist", "cobber", "willy-willies", "plonk". Choco
mentioned many other (low brow) words and he'd actually made them into rhyming
sentences!
Choco alone was reason enough for me to be glad that I attended the
conference.
Windows Vista
As an online help developer, the news of most interest to me was the future
of Microsoft's Vista. There were daily announcements and it was extraordinary to
me that people kept a day-by-day watch of the Microsoft web site. One report was
that Vista will be released in the first quarter of 2007. Given the delays so
far, this was greeted with skepticism by some of the presenters who have inside
sources in the Microsoft camp. Whenever it is released, the new, much
publicized, help system, Vista AP Help, will not be available to us in Version
1. After a lot of lobbying by people who have a vested interest in Help (the HAT
software developers) it may be released for general use in Version 2.
The Road Ahead
Mike Hamilton (of MadCap) gave us quite a lot of detail about Vista AP Help:
there will be no contents list and no index. To find your way around, you will
use the search facility. The help text will be displayed in a single window to
the right of a screen (similar to what we see now) and it will 'squash' the
contents of the application, rather than overwrite it. If you have only one help
window and can have a number of applications open, then it might be difficult to
determine what the displayed help is for. Currently, this can be determined by
the icon in the top left of the title bar. Whether to retain this 'one window'
concept is but one of the issues that Microsoft has to decide upon.
The new trend, set by Microsoft Vista, is that conceptual help will no longer
be offered. This came from Tony Self's overview of the future of documentation,
as forecast by some brave people at the Writers UA Conference.
Rhonda
Rhonda Bracey of Perth, gave an extremely interesting presentation on the
subject of editing screen based content. If you're asked to do this, you should
really make sure you know what it is you are expected to do: edit just the
words, check the quality and suitability of the graphics, check all the links
.... ? Rhonda also gave us lists of free software that we can use to help in
this editing task.
DITA
I have often wondered, should I ever venture into this world, whether I
should concentrate on learning about the newish kid on the block, DITA (Darwin
Information Typing Architecture), or the more mature DocBook. Tony Self gave us
the answer in a clearly named presentation "DITA or DocBook". Tony listed other
contenders for our attention, such as a simplified DocBook, Microsoft's AML, as
well as custom built schemas.
The answer to my major question, DITA or DocBook was: For print media,
DocBook was more suitable than DITA and DITA was the choice for online
documentation. Of course, nothing is ever 100 percent suitable and Tony gave us
a number of options to consider, should we be faced with introducing DITA into
our workplace.
Kylie
Kylie Weaver took me back to my dark ages with her presentation, reminding us
how useful flowcharts can be.
Kylie started with a simple example: washing dishes. She compared a written
description of washing dishes with the flow-charted version. The flow chart won!
Try it yourself. It certainly makes a change from the "Alien making a phone
call" used so often in tests of our suitability for employment as a technical
writer. During her presentation, Kylie gave us a glimpse of a tool that was once
on every IT person's desk, the plastic flow chart template. It reminded me of
how far we've come. The same shapes are still available to us, but now we get
them via Visio, Word Draw and PowerPoint (if we're desperate). Regardless of how
we draw a flow chart, Kylie's main guidelines were simple and easily remembered:
- Have a clear theme
- Have sensible start and end points
- Be consistent and keep to a relevant level of detail
- Make every box advance the theme
- Limit the objectives.
Uncle Dave
As usual, Dave Gash's presentation "Creating Self-Aware Navigation Devices"
was based on a very simple idea. Or is Dave's particular talent to explain
something complicated in a simple way? Either way, Dave's first presentation was
to provide navigation aids to online content. This was most suitable for web
sites, but gave me enough inspiration to start a task I've long thought about
doing, showing my online help users in which direction they will go (either up
or down) when they select a "See also" link in the online help window. In my
documentation, downward links provide more detail, upward ones provide less
detail. However, we don't give a clue, not even by the sequence of the items in
the list, which way the user will be going once they select a link. While Dave's
suggestions were to use Related Topic lists, Breadcrumbs or Buttons, it was the
method of delivery that was inspiring. Dave showed us how to easily create the
lists as a dropdown list (that was just one format), and how the list could be
put into an external file for ease of maintenance.
Dr Tom
On the face of it, the case study of Dr Tom James, who works for Salisbury
District Council, looked to be of limited interest, but he soon had us
enthralled with his description of collaboration between local county councils.
Most of the public don’t care who provides or pays for the fire service, police
service, garbage service or education, when they want information, they want it
as quickly as possible. So it makes sense to combine service information from
multiple councils in a single web site. Of course, each council's web site had a
different look and feel, a different way of storing data, and a different idea
of what data is to be presented. Making these disparate entities easy for a
customer to navigate and not to be concerned that they were moving from one site
to another, was the aim of the group of neighbouring councils. Tom's account of
the negotiations involved made me promise never to complain again about the
idiosyncratic personalities within my pool of subject matter experts.
Dr Tom's second presentation was based on a more intelligent use of Cascading
Style Sheets (CSS). As he pointed out, if we use CSSs at all, we do so mostly to
control fonts, colours and spacing. Tom's presentation showed us how we can
dramatically change the arrangement of information, just by using a CSS, and how
we can also provide a print only version with a totally different layout of the
information. Dual purpose CCSs are easy to create and we should use them.
Gerry
As usual, Gerry Gaffney made perfect sense in his "DIY Usability"
presentation. Gerry's presentation showed us how we could conduct usability
tests with the minimum of outside help and on a shoe-string budget. We could
even go some way towards usability testing without the involvement of our users
- although user involvement is always the most valuable activity. Gerry
maintained that we should at least start small, with perhaps a well thought out
questionnaire, rather than not start at all.
Gerry's presentation showed us how we could conduct usability tests with the
minimum of outside help and on a shoe-string budget.
Collaborative Authoring
Tony Self took us on a quick tour of the various tools we now have available
for collaborative authoring.
I must say that I didn't expect to hear about Wikis, Podcasts, RSS (Really
Simple Syndication), and Blogs at an AODC Conference, but it left me
enthusiastic about implementing some of these tools in my own workplace. Tony
looked into the future with some of the new Google initiatives and the news that
AuthorIT are adding web service extensions to their software with a view to
future database collaboration.
The Finalé
Dr Carol Barnum tackled the subject of Indexing vs Full Text Search with some
movies of people trying to find specific answers using both types of navigation.
The people in the movies were encouraged to say what they were thinking as they
went along, and this was quite amusing, as frustration seemed to be the
principal emotion in this exercise. The result was that those with an index
found the information required much more successfully than those with just the
text search capability. In spite of this, the news is that
Microsoft is removing the index from their next generation of help and Apple
will be re-instating it. Regardless of whether you are an Apple or Microsoft
enthusiast, you can't ever have missed the claim that Apple is always the winner
in the usability competition. Seems that they will continue to win in the
usability stakes.
All in All
All in all, it was a very worthwhile conference. I can't say I was inspired
by the location, Cairns, which I have never visited
before. But perhaps Cairns just compared badly with the absolutely excellent
conference and the camaraderie of my fellow technical communicators.
I just wish you could all have attended!
AODC - the Australasian Online Documentation and
Content Conference
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