In my writing role at work , I occasionally post updates on behalf of our IT organization to various social media channels, such as Twitter, Facebook, Google Plus, our blog, and a user forum. Most of my activity on these social media channels is sparse and sporadic — a few minutes on an occasional hour. However, lately I’ve felt that we aren’t tapping into social … more »

Lately I’ve been working on quick reference guides that contain a lot of callouts around screenshots. (By callouts, I mean explanatory text that points to some part of the image.) In trying to come up with the right design for callouts, I surveyed how other authors approached callouts. Below is a sampling of about 14 different approaches to callouts, with my analysis below each example. … more »

One of the advantages of belonging to the Society for Technical Communication (STC) is having access to the rich information sources on technical communication. These sources include Intercom, the Technical Communication Journal, past proceedings from conferences, the Notebook blog, and more. Unfortunately, there isn’t a single search that allows you to comprehensively search all of these sources at once. I this screencast, I show you … more »

Theresa Putkey explains how to make context-sensitive help more usable. Don’t just present a single task to the user that relates to the page the user is on, but rather present a variety of topics spanning the how, when, why, and other related issues for the page.

As part of the solution to STC’s financial situation, some members have talked about making Intercom an online magazine only, removing the printed version that is mailed out to thousands of members each month. Many people think the move from paper to online would be a tremendous blow to the STC, one that would significantly decrease member value towards one of STC’s most attractive assets. … more »

Last week I wrote a post about avoiding extinction as a technical communicator. The basic idea was that you have to keep up with the learning styles, preferences, and behaviors of your users to survive. That often means avoiding the long manual and incorporating more interactive, collaborative, or audiovisual means of instruction. Almost the exact same argument could be made about the STC and its … more »

The STC Intercom published an article I wrote about Writer River called “Caught in the Current of Writer River: Building and Participating in Community-Driven Websites.” If you’re a member of the STC and you have access to the Intercom, check your latest copy (January 2009) or log in to stc.org and download the article here (PDF). If you don’t have access, you can read the … more »

“Technical Communicator” is a term that, as much as I dislike, can be extremely important for triggering Google Alerts set up by the Society for Technical Communication‘s Intercom editorial staff. How do I know this? Well, a couple of months ago I saw a summary of my blog post on video cameras and SMEs mentioned in the STC Intercom’s Cut & Paste section (shown below). … more »

A week ago I read a flattering comment in one of Heidi’s posts. She says Intercom articles would be more enjoyable distributed as blog posts, and then adds that good blog posts are just as good as Intercom articles. Heidi writes: The thing about Intercom is that I think that these articles could all be blog posts. It would be a lot handier to read … more »

My article, “Top 5 Podcasts for Technical Communicators,” appeared in STC’s Intercom today. It’s in the Cut & Paste section here (stc login required). I didn’t have a lot of space to expand, so I thought I’d take the liberty here. First, settling on just 5 podcasts was agonizing and I thought about it for weeks, constantly drawing up lists and ranking them. I actually … more »