• Tuesday of workshops, choose 2 of 6
• Wednesday and Thursday of 2 dozen+ presentations in 3 streams
• Tuesday and Wednesday nights’ bed and breakfast accommodation at the conference hotel
• Gala Dinner on Wednesday evening
• Dinner on Tuesday evening
• Lunch and refreshments on all three days

* Member rates applies to members of the ISTC, of any TCeurope organisation or of STC (USA)! For non-members, early bird registration is 690 GBP, approx. 1,050 USD or 820 EUR.

But don’t delay – you must book and pay here before the end of June to qualify!

Prepare to have your questions reframed! To me, this is one of the greatest benefits of a tech comm conference: You arrive with a question – and get it “more than answered”. I talked to someone who came to Atlanta trying to find the right tool and quickly started collecting different leads. Then one conversation in the hallway made her realize that she should first re-evaluate her processes and postpone the tool selection. By reframing her question away from the premature tool space, she’s now more confident she’ll come out with a more efficient solution than she could’ve gotten by merely switching tools.

Latch on to wider perspectives. There were several sessions dedicated to neighboring disciplines and approaches. I was happy to hear David Pogue’s keynote and Lee LeFever’s presentation address cognitive issues of tech comm which dovetailed nicely with my own session about semiotics and mental models. I don’t think any of this will revolutionize the way we do tech comm. But it’s an approach that helps us to understand how successful tech comm works and why. And it even complements other areas such as Information Architecture, as I found out when I compared notes with Alison Riley after our talks. There were also several sessions about data visualization that neatly complemented each other.

Lightning talks are great fun! Again, the summit had two sessions of lightning talks (5 minute talks with slides advancing automatically and mercilessly every 15 seconds). This is a great format because you can transport a lot of information in short time – and it’s fun to watch them go off the rails a bit when the slides run away from a stumbling, bumbling presenter. It’s all in good spirits, though: Everybody in the audience admires the courage of lightning talkers and would be just as scared of slipping up. But please, lightning talkers: Some of you can be a little more courageous and go for a bit more content. Don’t plan for dead air as you wait for the slide to change, just in case you slip up.

Standing room only at the second Lightning Talks session. Photo by ‏@StubbornlyWrite.

Progressions are difficult. I find progressions generally a difficult format (and I let the conference organizers know in the evaluation forms). For many topics, 20 minutes is awfully short for a stage-setting presentation and a discussion among the 6 to 10 attendees. One progression leader who succeeded admirably in my opinion is Roger Renteria. His progression on the benefits of volunteer opportunities was quick to set the stage and open to invite questions, comments and ideas from different angles! Another solution I’ve seen is to relegate much of the info to the handout, but that seemed less successful than Roger’s approach.

Choose sessions by title and speaker name. At previous conferences, I usually selected sessions to attend by the title and the description. Now as I’m familiar with several speakers, I find that I can select sessions just as reliably by speaker name. If I know and like someone’s work and perspective, whether from a blog or an article or a previous talk, I usually find it worth attending their session, even if I might not have selected it otherwise.

There are no stars. Okay, so some names loom larger in the tech comm space than others, especially in twitter and blogs. But I’ve found everybody really accessible and genuinely interested in tech comm at large. I just figure that if I’ve gone through the trouble to attend (as Atlanta is not the hometown for most of us), I might as well make the most of it. And rubbing shoulders and engaging with people whose work I admire is a great opportunity, whether it’s after a session, in the hallway or after-hours at the bar.

Welcome first-timers and students. I’ve seen some of the most enthusiastic reactions to sessions from students, graduates and first-time attendees. They often bring fresh ideas and new perspectives to our profession. Maybe some ideas are owing to youthful idealism. Still, we can all use their energy to make sure they become engaged and happy practitioners who can carry our community forward!

Go meet the vendors! I’ve found the vendors and exhibiting consultants genuinely interested, putting tech comm before sales. So I enjoyed getting acquainted and comparing notes with them, even if I’m not in the market for the products or services they offer. MadCap’s staff explained to me how to repair corrupted topics (I know – I shouldn’t corrupt them in the first place… )

@MadCapSoftware booth at the STC13 expo.

Over at Adobe, Scott Abel was interviewing tech comm’ers about hot topics and pet peeves; look for the videos to come to Adobe’s blog.

@valswisher and @scottabel prepare for a video at Adobe’s booth. Photo by @sarahokeefe.

If you’ve been to the STC Summit, please share your insights in the comments. If you haven’t, feel free to ask whether it can deliver what you are hoping for. I’ll answer as best as I can.

Alyson argued that “nice to have” initiatives are no longer compelling enough to get tech comm a budget or a mandate. To play a mission-critical role in a corporation, tech comm must plug into the corporate strategy. However, that strategy and its stakeholders usually isn’t waiting for us to put in our two cents. So we tech comm’ers must:

1. Focus on corporate strategy as opposed to tactics.
2. Play to the motivations behind the strategy, so we can come up with ways to support it with our unique skills and contributions.

The following moves can help with that second step:

• Address the “buyer evaluates” and “buy” stages of the product. Usually, we speak to the “customer uses” stage of our product where there’s often more cost than income. The challenge is to make it compelling for buyers and sales to also use our content to their benefit in the more profitable stages. A good start is to ask sales: “What is the hardest part of your job?” and see if we can help them with the information we provide.
• Influence social content to help leads along the marketing funnel from awareness to loyalty and advocacy. That doesn’t mean to “sell out” completely to marketing. It’s often as easy and sensible as including customer benefits in our content. Simply add the “why” to the “how” and give clients a chance to understand and promote your product.

Both moves boil down to the same principle: Don’t educate stakeholders in sales, marketing, product management, etc. about the product. Instead, imagine what the success of these respective stakeholders looks like and address that:

1. Analyze opportunities your product can address in the terms of sales and marketing.
2. Craft an effective story that centers on your content and how it can drive revenue, sales, customer satisfaction and loyalty.
3. Prove it with metrics that speak to the stakeholders.

When it comes to metrics, page views of documentation usually don’t impress managers much. Instead, Alyson suggested “time-to-value” (TTV) which measures the customer’s time from buying or paying for the product to the moment they reap value from it. This is similar to “return-on-investment”, but TTV can be clearer to measure when investment consists of one-time payments plus maintenance fees. Also, it’s easier for tech comm to favorably influence TTV…

Explanations are hard and try as you might, they can still fail – as anyone knows who has given driving directions to a stranger and then seen them make the wrong turn.

The key to good explanations is empathy with the “explainee”, so you can explain something in their terms. What gets in the way is the “curse of knowledge” which means we cannot remember what it was like not to know how get to the specialty store or how a cloud service like twitter or dropbox works.

To show how explanations increase understanding, Lee used an explanation scale. First you have little understanding, and you care about the big idea, the “why?” Why should you care about a cloud service, why is this important to you? Once you have the “why?” down, you’re ready for basic understanding of the essentials, the “how”? How does a tool work, how can I use it to my benefit? To get expert understanding, you assemble more and more details for different scenarios – and before long, you have all the knowledge to explain this thing yourself!

Four features can make explanations successful:

Context anchors an explanation in shared experience and creates agreement. We all know what it feels like to have misplaced your keys, and we can agree that it’s very annoying. Context is important to show why something is relevant to you.

Story ties together a problem and its solution in a narrative arc. That can be as simple as: “Bob has a problem. Bob finds a solution. Bob is happy!” Story invites our empathy because we can identify with Bob and root for him. It illustrates facts, such as cause and effect, in real life.

Connections can provide a shortcut to other stories we already know. When the producers of the 1979 science fiction movie “Alien” sought funding, they connected their project to a recent successful movie in three simple words: “Jaws in Space”.

Analogies can emphasize “what’s really going on”. Consider an encounter with a bear and how it sets off your “fight-or-flight” impulse with stress hormones. Now transfer that experience: “Imagine the bear comes home from the bar every night.” This analogy gives you a good impression what it feels like to be the child or partner of an abusive alcoholic.

Lee closed by sharing several examples, both from his CommonCraft videos and elsewhere.

The panel, moderated by Nicky Bleiel. Photo by @viqui_dill.

Saul’s opening statement pointed out important differences between tech comm and training:

• Tech comm doesn’t aim at information retention, but training does.
• Tech comm’ers mainly create content, but trainers mainly teach, whether online or “in real life”.

Yet there are large overlaps between the disciplines and their practice, especially in “informal learning”, specifically, in the purpose, the content, and the consumer’s awareness of learning.

Kevin added further common values and features which both share:

• Brevity in topics, in e-learning lessons (typically less than 5 minutes), or in a video (less than 2 minutes)
• Step-by-step instructions in task topics and lessons
• Direct address of the user as “you”

Matt explained how he focused on pragmatic information delivery where his single-sourcing workflow almost automatically combines “teaching and telling” in documents.

In the discussion that followed, the panelists addressed further aspects of that intersection of tech comm and training:

• By emphasizing user action and tasks over functionality descriptions, you can offer resourceful users interactions and showing and telling to mix and match. However, exactly targeting your audience always precisely is usually not possible (neither in training nor in tech comm), so resist the temptation to “helicopter-parent” your learners.
• That intersection works well with thought-through minimalism (which is not the same as writing in a concise manner).
• Selecting the right channel and format can benefit both purposes, tech comm and training, tremendously, whether you choose videos or interactions or text.
• Sample projects can be helpful to support and illustrate both,  learning and, to a lesser extent, documentation. They can be used as templates for a quick start to explore user scenarios. Personas are a great idea, too, but they’re of limited value as long as they don’t support the person(a)’s task.

In closing, the panelists pointed out that the focus of tech comm and e-learning alike is on people, not theories, methods or tools. In either domain, all users are different and many are extrinsically motivated by policy, law or certification to learn. So make it easy on them and keep them moving along swiftly.

Alan Houser, President of the STC, introduced him as the “most publicly visible technical communicator on the planet”. David started with a recap of his earlier address. He explained (again) how up to 2009, the acceleration in technological developments had led to a challenge and a paradox. The challenge concerns hardware where machines have become smaller and smaller, while our means to operate them, namely our fingers, have remained essentially the same size. The paradox occurs in software where companies often justify the most recent upgrade by piling on yet more new features – without necessarily having a good place to put them.

David Pogue delivering the keynote speech at the STC Summit 2013. Photo by Nitza Hauser.

Out of this challenge and this paradox comes the unexpected situation where a company such as Apple can achieve a competitive advantage by successfully eliminating features in a device such as the iPod. This cult of simplicity sells, and the product or service with fewer buttons win, whether it’s an iPad or the Google start search screen.

The reason why this works is psychological, says David: Achievements give us joy and make us feel that, yes, I can do this, and for this, I’m a good person. Conversely, not understanding how stuff or works or why stuff is so weird terrifies us.

Which brought David to Windows 8 and his task to write book for his “Missing Manual” series about the operating system. David made it clear that he appreciates much about Windows 8 – however, there are certain features that drive him crazy because they task him with documenting something that makes no sense – a feeling many tech comm’ers know well.

Specifically, Windows 8 presents two versions of many applications, two browsers, two e-mail clients, etc. - one in the GUI with tiles and one in the regular desktop. In the tiles GUI, there are no folders or files – and the control panel with system settings is only available via search.

Okay, so David decided to document the two GUIs in two separate parts of his book. Which raised the question how you call each GUI. The desktop is the desktop. But what is the GUI with tiles called? It started out as “Metro” until a German retail chain of the same name threaten to sue Microsoft. The “Modern UI” moniker was internal Microsoft lingo only. So David asked Microsoft directly. The GUI with tiles it turns out is called – “Windows 8″! As is the operating system in which the GUI with tiles and the desktop both live…

This didn’t make sense to David, so he invented the name “TileWorld” – and the name stuck! (… it does sound like a DIY store for bathrooms to me…)

David thought the main issue was the decision to combine the two GUIs. The common desktop is a more cumbersome but runs all applications and is known to most Windows users today. “TileWorld” has its advantages in a mobile tablet world, but is unsuitable for many uses such as drawing, spreadsheets, word processing, etc. – all these don’t work well with gestures on a large touchscreen on the desk in front of you.

The takeaway lesson David shared was: Terminology should be for clarity and to serve the reader.”

David ended his keynote to rousing applause as he regaled us to his very own version of the show tune “I Feel Pretty”, “Im On Twitter”.

Addicted to meaning:
Mental models for technical communicators

Tue, May 7, 4:00 pm in room Hanover AB

My presentation will explore how “meaning” works in technical communications, why it fails and how you can create meaningful documentation. I will draw on the cognitive psychology of mental models and advances in user experience design to show why minimalism works, but FAQ’s don’t, and how to write for users without irritating them.

Being meaningful in technical communications is harder to measure than being correct, concise or consistent. However, it is just as essential: Understanding how and why communication is meaningful to users helps to create more effective documentation. Participants will get a deeper understanding and a fresh perspective on what makes communications meaningful.

You will learn:

• What distinguishes data, information, and knowledge
• How (technical) communication transmits meaning
• What mental models are and how they shape the meaning that users create from documentation
• How we are addicted to meaning
• How to ensure your documentation is meaningful

It’s a G-rated session, so you don’t need any previous experience or knowledge of psychology – just a curiosity what makes us tick when we read and write documentation.

So treat yourself to a fun romp of aha moments in the last session slot of the day – hope to see you in Atlanta!

• Tech comm’ers and UX’ers can and should join forces because we have essentially the same goals.
• Barcamps can be a fantastic alternative to conventional conferences.

While the 270 attendees were a mixed bunch, to be sure, I met only about a handful of technical communicators like myself. So what was it like to be a tech comm’er among hundreds of UX professionals, graphic designers, information architects, web designers, etc.?

Barcampers hanging out between sessions at Copenhagen’s IT University; photo by @andersmn

So close, and yet so far apart

I frequently heard the question: What does a technical communicator actually do? The answer “Write documentation” proved confusing because that meant to some the documentation of a UX project. “Writing user manuals and online help” was satisfactory, but apparently not an obvious answer…

That’s a pity because at heart UX and tech comm share a gommon goals: We both make products mean something to customers. We just do it in different ways: UX’ers design the actual experience. Tech comm’ers help the user along with additional instructional, background, and technical information, when necessary.

If tech comm’s user assistance is embedded in UX’s user interface we actually blur the boundary: User assistance can start with UX field labels and progressively disclose more documentation via tool tips to a full-blown help system.

We even have an external reason to join forces as we both occasionally suffer from similar misperceptions when it comes to the value we add. The varieties of our achievements often goes unnoticed outside our respective fields, as the cliché goes: “Everyone can draw / write…”

What makes a barcamp special?

A barcamp tries to avoid many of the hierarchical pitfalls of conventional conferences. It emphasizes participation and networking over listening and consumption. The general motto is “You are the barcamp” – and the program is built at the beginning of event when potential speakers pitch their ideas for sessions. Depending on the number of votes from attendees, speakers get a spot on the program.

At UXcampCPH, everybody got to speak: Of approximately 270 participants, there were only 16 pitchers for the 24 session slots. The event was a bit special in that they invited 3 keynote speakers – which often isn’t done at barcamps to stress the egalitarian, participatory vibe. But in Copenhagen, the keynotes worked well by bringing everyone onto the same page (see my previous post of session summaries).

UXcampCPH participants pitching their sessions; photo by @JohannaBlomgren

Here’s how I would compare features:

Conferences vs. Barcamps

• Primary tool: Laptop vs. iPhone
• Communication artefact: Business cards vs. twitter handle
• Networking over drinks opportunity: Drinks reception vs. pitchers of beer
• Food: Banquet buffet vs. organic soup kitchen
• Location: Conference hotel/convention center vs. university lecture halls
• Sponsors’ presence: Trade exhibition vs. brand exposure via room names & swag

If you know more reasons why tech comm and UX should join forces – or what distinguishes barcamps from conferences – feel free to leave a comment!

I blog about it because I think this is a good deal. Also, I like O’Reilly ebooks because they are DRM-free. I am not affiliated with O’Reilly or Elsevier. I get no payment in money or in kind for writing this.

Here are some titles of interest for tech comm and UX people. So if you’ve heard about one of these titles or keep it on a list of books to check out, here’s a good opportunity.

• The info below is straight from the O’Reilly web site.
• Prices are before the discount.
• Use discount code WKESEVE to get 50% off until 23 April.

For tech comm

Designing the Search Experience
By Tony Russell-Rose, Tyler Tate
December 2012
Ebook: $39.95

Letting Go of the Words, 2nd Edition
By Janice Redish
September 2012
Ebook: $49.95

Information Visualization, 3rd Edition
By Colin Ware
May 2012
Ebook: $64.95

Content Strategy at Work
By Margot Bloomstein
January 2012
Ebook: $29.95

For UX

Designing the Search Experience
By Tony Russell-Rose, Tyler Tate
December 2012
Ebook: $39.95

Agile User Experience Design
By Diana Brown
October 2012
Ebook: $39.95

Observing the User Experience, 2nd Edition
By Mike Kuniavsky, Andrea Moed, Elizabeth Goodman
September 2012
Ebook: $59.95

Information Visualization, 3rd Edition
By Colin Ware
May 2012
Ebook: $64.95

Quantifying the User Experience
By Jeff Sauro, James R Lewis
March 2012
Ebook: $49.95

Sketching User Experiences: The Workbook
By Saul Greenberg, Sheelagh Carpendale, Nicolai Marquardt, Bill Buxton
November 2011
Ebook: $19.95

Global UX
By Whitney Quesenbery, Daniel Szuc
October 2011
Ebook: $49.95

User Experience Management
By Arnie Lund
May 2011
Ebook: $39.95

Brave NUI World
By Daniel Wigdor, Dennis Wixon
April 2011
Ebook: $39.95

Thoughts on Interaction Design, 2nd Edition
By Jon Kolko
January 2011
Ebook: $29.95

Usability Testing Essentials
By Carol M. Barnum
October 2010
Ebook: $49.95

Smart Things: Ubiquitous Computing User Experience Design
By Mike Kuniavsky
September 2010
Ebook: $41.95

Sketching User Experiences: Getting the Design Right and the Right Design
By Bill Buxton
July 2010
Ebook: $49.95

Measuring the User Experience
By Thomas Tullis, William Albert
July 2010
Ebook: $53.95

Visual Thinking
By Colin Ware
July 2010
Ebook: $45.95

User-Centered Design Stories
By Carol Righi, Janice James
July 2010
Ebook: $69.95

The Essential Persona Lifecycle: Your Guide to Building and Using Personas
By Tamara Adlin, John Pruitt
March 2010
Ebook: $31.95

Huge thanks to the local organizers who were incredibly dedicated and competent all through the event and pulled it off without a hitch! And thanks to the sponsors who made this all possible.

Below is a summary of some of the sessions I attended. I’ll have more to say about what tech comm can learn from UX and the differences between the two professions and between a barcamp and a conference, so watch this space. (There’s RSS and e-mail subscriptions to the right to remind you when new posts appear…)

Navigation as cross-channel sense-making

Andrea Resmini‘s keynote on Friday was a dense conceptual talk about navigation. Whether on a web site, in an app or in a city, navigation helps use to make sense of our surroundings. We use paths, of edges/walls and of nodes/intersections to choose from available options.

Andrea Resmini starting his keynote, being photographed by Eric Reiss; photo by @kmdk

In our navigation, our perceptions may differ from the physical reality as a city map never matches our personal idea of a city. But maps still are good, sharable representations of quests in which we act our personal narratives.

On the web and in apps this means that we need to learn to “navigate the database”, for example, by perceiving Facebook as our regular bar: It’s probably not a perfect place, but it’s where all our friends hang out. So as we use navigation, we create our own choreography across several channels which makes our experience cohesive and meaningful.

- I thought Andrea’s talk was a bit academic, but certainly thought-provoking. I was glad that a friend of mine had previously tipped me off to one of his earlier talks about “Pervasive IA” which I found a bit more pragmatic and a good introduction to Andrea’s work.

Prototyping user experience

Leisa Reichelt‘s opening keynote was a well-argued, convincing plea for prototyping. Iterative prototyping beats waterfall projects – if you can afford it.

Waterfall-model projects, Leisa said, are often more orderly than the projects and the real world which hosts them: They “require your best ideas while you still know least about the problem.” But if you start out the project with an assigned front-end developer and real content, you can start with a good idea and iterate your solution until it works in terms of quality and volume and until it satisfies the customer (or time/money run out).

Photo by @Berlinertorte

Prototyping, according to Leisa, beats abstraction, will expose stupid ideas quickly and helps to make good decisions based on real content and real solutions. It makes the strategy live in deliverables, not in meetings.

There are two potential issues with prototyping:

• Some companies find it more difficult or more expensive to throw away a prototype development than a solution design. But in either case you will most likely throw away something during a project.

• It’s an artisan model that doesn’t scale well: It’s great in one project, but it’s very difficult to assign the same developer or designer or technical communicator to two projects at the same time.

- I enjoyed Leisa’s talk thanks to her way of presenting: Very lively, emphasizing stories and anecdotes, but her main points are well supported by her slides. It inspired me enough that I will try prototyping in the near future – I have a small in-house tech comm project for which this might work well…

Pattern recognition

In my own session, I talked about pattern recognition as an essential mental strategy for acquiring and disseminating knowledge, even though most of us are not aware of it. When applied consciously, UX designers can employ pattern recognition processes to develop effective user experiences more efficiently and help users orient themselves.

- I sincerely thank the 100 or so people who attended my session for their kind, attentive reception. I am especially grateful for the engaged discussion we’ve had how pattern recognition can be applied to UX design. You can find my slides over at slideshare.

Simple drawings

Louise Klinker in her presentation showed the many ways how just about everyone can use sketching. First, she walked us through the basics how most people can draw basic shapes like a line, a circle, a rectangle, a triangle, a wavy line and a 5-pointed star. Then she showed how you don’t really need any more shapes than these. Put them together, and you can sketch people (a 5-pointed star with a circle instead of the top arm), place (houses or meadows) and process (using arrows, clouds, symbols).

Second, she showed that sketching can be useful in many areas of business. You can, of course, sketch the obvious, such as GUI and web site designs, but you can also sketch plans and workflows. You can sketch processes and agreements and from them whole business models. Here’s the basic business model of AirBnB:

Photo by @isa_157

- I’m habitually very much a words guy (hey, I’m called a tech writer, not a tech sketcher…). So I really enjoyed that session, because it got me over the fear of sketching and the thought that I cannot draw… I’m nowhere near the 30 days or so it takes to anchor a new habit, but I’m not such an “un-drawing” guy as I thought…

Expert reviews

Rolf Mölich showed how expert reviews of web sites are as reliable as and not more expensive than usability tests with users – IF they are done right. Because data trumps opinion any time.

Photo by @saevarsson

To get expert reviews right, you need actual experts in both usability and the subject domain, these experts need solid methods, and the test needs open discussion to avoid dismissal of the experts’ results as mere opinions.

- I liked Rolf’s interactive mode that had us signal our collective opinions about expert reviews using green, red and yellow (the latter for undecided). And I appreciated his candor when he admitted that he’d had second thoughts about the heuristic method he invented with Jakob Nielsen about 20 years ago.

Beyond responsiveness

Eric Reiss‘ closing keynote summed up many threads and ideas of the day, among them:

• Anticipatory design can improve upon responsiveness. Responsive design often focuses on the device more than on the user. For anticipatory design, extract patterns of use and behavior and make the application situationally aware. The situation includes not just location, but also time of day: Around midnight, show me the bars close by, not the barbers.
• More isn’t better. A portal with 49 links and zero focus is not useful. 20 pages with a good story beat a thousand pages.
• Big data, bigger insights. Spot patterns in user data and decide which are meaningful and relevant to your user experience to derive value.

Photo by @mortenriis

• Create uniqueness. The “A” in IA (information architecture) is not only about structure and usefulness, but also about having a personality and beauty. Don’t worship form: Design patterns are mere templates, not design in itself. Don’t enslave yourself to the process.

- Eric brought the barcamp to a great close with his lively presentation. I didn’t mind much that it was a collection of points rather than a coherent narrative, because I could recognize and connect to several of them as he summarized the last one and a half days.

If you’ve attended one of the sessions, feel free to leave a comment or question!